How Many is Too Much?
Page 34
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
IN the course of his Henry Spurrier memorial lecture earlier this month, Mr. James Amos committed himself, although a little cautiously, to an estimate of between 750 and 1,000 vehicles as a suitable maximum for a passenger transport business. Mr. Amos made it clear that he was thinking about the organization and not necessarily the ownership of the undertaking, and that London and other large cities presented special problems, but the figure he suggested has been put forward independently on more than one occasion by other people who should be expected to know.
Before the coming of the Road Haulage Executive made the subject unfashionable, similar speculations were made about the optimum maximum number of goods vehicles under the control of one haulier. The assumption was that, when it exceeded a certain size, a road haulage business became less efficient and less economical to run. As Mr. Amos put it, "there is a tendency to lose some aspects of personal operational control." The desirable maximum for hauliers was usually thought to be below the figure given by Mr. Amos. It was frequently put at 500, and some operators who had reached this figure were reluctant to enlarge their business any further although circumstances often compelled them to do so.
No doubt Mr. Amos would find it difficult to set out in so many words the many reasons influencing his judgment that a fleet a 750-1,000 vehicles was the desirable maximum for a passenger undertaking. Such judgment is the fruit of many years' experience, and as such must be given weight. But somebody else, who may know nothing about transport may feel himself equally entitled to make a guess or to suggest that Mr. Amos is inaccurate. It would be useful if some sort of independent approach could throw a light upon the question.
Disguising Significance Statistics are in the fashion. They are poured out by every kind of organization, analysed, re-analysed and often made to prove exactly opposite things. It is gratifying to know that processes are being discovered by means of which statistics can be made to fall into line, so that it becomes harder to disguise their true significance.
Science is creeping up on numerology. Investigation has shorn an even wider range of figures that fall into some sort of pattern and are therefore predictable. It is now a commonplace, although once it would not have been so, that a graph on which is plotted, say, numbers of people in a large community arranged according to their weight, would produce a symmetrical curve rising to its highest point in the middle. Nature appears to act in this way, but it is more of a novelty to learn that many of the artificial institutions of man can also be reduced to mathematical order.
With the ,aid of monumental patience, a group of scientific investigators in the U.S.A. has discovered that if all the different words in a novel are counted and arranged in order of frequency, the numbers decrease in a regular fashion, so that, for example, the hundredth word in the list is used ten times less often that the tenth.
A32 It was noticed that this numerical harmony is lacking in the literary productions of people suffering from certain mental disorders such as schizophrenia. A reasonable conclusion is that any noticeable departure from what should be expected may be regarded as evidence that something is wrong.
Any novel which is a work of art may he described as an organized whole. Further investigation showed that the same mathematical principle is embedded in all kinds of other organized wholes, from the individual incomes of a society to the populations of all the towns in a country. Here again, variations from the expected are instructive. London is much too large compared with the other towns of Great Britain, but considered as the commercial centre of the world its size would not be far wrong.
Preferred Maximum It so happens that most of the published statistics of road passenger transport exclude the 8,000 vehicles of the London Transport Executive, a figure nearly ten times as large as the preferred maximum of Mr. Amos. Mathematically speaking, the remainder of the industry may reasonably be accepted as an organized whole, and the figures available should be sufficient to indicate whether any sort of order exists in the relation between the number of operators owning any given number of vehicles.
The summary of the reports of the Licensing Authorities for 1950-51 shows that there were 1,342 operators with one vehicle, 841 operators with two vehicles, 546 operators with three vehicles, and 416 operators with four vehicles. The drop in frequency is not unlike that of words in a novel, and one would expect five-vehicle operators to number about 350 and 10-vehicle operators about 175. In fact, there were 1,053 operators owning between five and nine vehicles, an average frequency of 211. Beyond this point the published figures are insufficient for reliable conclusions, but it looks as if the logical maximum would be a little over 1,000 vehicles, not far from the estimate given by Mr. Amos.
The annual reports covering the operation of goods vehicles are much less informative. All one can say is that the 40,000 holders of A and B licences have an average of three vehicles each and that the average for C-licence holders is rather less than two. It would be interesting to know in what proportion these vehicles are distributed, but one may be certain that the sequence does not provide for the largest operator to have a fleet of 40,000. Recentreductions in the number of vehicles operated by R.H.E. may be recognized not as the result of operational economies or falling traffics, but as the instinctive urge to trim the nationalized fleet to its proper size.
On the 'other hand, it is just possible that the ,figure would be as high as 40678, in which event we may be sure that the Minister of Transport, who has access to all the necessary information, made a careful study of statistical research on both sides of the Atlantic before deciding that six-fifths was the appropriate proportion for the British Transport Commission to retain of the fleets formerly operated by the railways.