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Any Law to Restrict to Uneconomic Limits the Speed of Commercial Vehicles Will Be Unsound.

24th December 1929
Page 35
Page 36
Page 35, 24th December 1929 — Any Law to Restrict to Uneconomic Limits the Speed of Commercial Vehicles Will Be Unsound.
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

WE proffer no excuse for reverting to the

V V subject of the drastic limits of speed which it is proposed in the Road Traffic Bill to impose upon commercial-motor vehicles of all classes, except in the case of passenger vehicles constructed to carry not more than eight persons. The subject is one which is greatly exercising the minds of all those concerned in the road-transport industry, whether as manufacturers or as users, and although the general public may not, at the moment, be showing much concern, there is not a shadow of doubt that it will be greatly affected if these limits be imposed and endeavours made strictly to enforce them.

There have recently been sonic very interesting comments upon this matter in the House of Lords. For instance, Viscount Cecil, in commenting upon the invidious comparison between no speed limit for private cars and various limits for commercial vehicles, stated that he was quite sure that drivers of vehicles limited as to speed would disregard the law in exactly the same way as their richer neighbours had already so successfully disregarded it in the past.

Viscount Sumner has raised the question as to how speed limits can be enforced upon commercial vehicles when private vehicles are to be free from any limit, and he considers that the limit must be the same for everybody. This he understood to be a fundamental principle of modern democracy—that everything must be the same for everybody.

His Lordship made one almost startling comment. This was that no democratic Government will stand up against an organized demand by the owners of commercial vehicles to have their speed limits abolished if it proposes to leave one class of car free. If Parliament had done its duty 20 years ago, he continued, it would have amended the 20-mile limit by a single-clause Act of Parliament, because when the motorcar ceased to be an uncertain and often dangerous piece of mechanism, and had been developed far more rapidly than did public opinion into a highly flexible and easily controllable piece of machinery, then was the time to have altered tial speed limit and to make it more rational. We have now reached a stage, he said, when, If there is to be a speed limit at all, it must be high.

Apparently most of the arguments raised in the Lords and elsewhere have been based purely upon the practicability or otherwise of applying limits, and, so far, little has been brought forward in relation to the crushing effects which unduly low speed limits will have upon the economic future of road transport.

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Organisations: House of Lords

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