Road haulage (GB) vital statistics
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HAVING in the past few weeks looked at the way in which statistics are presented and how they do not always represent what they purport to show—I mean now to move on and deal with the importance of being able to pick out the really vital figures concerning road transport. In an examination answer the candidate must steer a route between the extremes of vagueness—"quite a number" and "not many"—and producing a welter of memorized statistics some relevant and others totally irrelevant. In looking at road haulage this week and road passenger next, I am presenting only the bare, essential skeleton, but it is a frame with many of the distortions removed.
The main source is the Ministry of Transport annual Highway Statistics which is bolstered by the rather dated Survey of Road Goods Transport 1962 for which the final reports were available in 1966.
It is essential to be clear about size and the simplest numerical way of presenting this data for vehicles licensed in 1967 (the latest figures available) is: It is extremely useful to split C licences to show the great mass of small-capacity vehicles (more than half are under one ton unladen weight). This explains the apparent anomaly that while C licence vehicles constitute about 85 per cent of all vehicles they perform just over 40 per cent of the tonmileage operated by all goods vehicles in Great Britain. Own-account operators are, of course, additionally more concerned on occasion with service than utilization and a high proportion of journeys are purely local.
Figures for tons carried and ton miles have been estimated and show the following trend over the last decade: of the ton-mileage performed is accounted for by 396,000 vehicles of over 3 tons unladen weight.
The present system whereby the C licence is open-ended and has to be granted (unless the applicant has previously had a licence revoked or suspended) is very soon due to be changed under the Transport Act, 1968 whereby operators with vehicles over 30cwt unladen weight will normally have to apply for an operator's licence. Thus, these statistics will in the future have to be estimated in quite a different fashion, probably by weight rather than by function.
Another way of looking at size is to calculate expenditure on the services provided by commercial goods vehicles. In 1966, the estimated figure was £2,350m, alone statistic which by itself means very little. Seen as a figure of about 40 per cent of all consumers' expenditure in the United Kingdom on transport the figure begins to breathe some life. Cars, motorcycles and pedal cycles, for example, account for only slightly more, at £2,544m in 1966.