THE AMOUNT of freight carried by lorries will increase significantly
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this year as the economy becomes more active, but will slacken off by 1989, forecasts the Henley Centre. But there are possibilities for a far healthier economy and freight industry in the Nineties.
With the economy showing an estimated annual improvement of two per cent until the end of the Eighties, the index of tonne/kilometres of road goods transport is expected to rise from the 1984 level of 100.5 to 104.7 in 1985. This index is a rough measure of the volumes of freight carried by road.
However, the index drops down again to 100.1 in 1989 perhaps because of the falls in consumer spending forecast and the slight rise in strength of rail freight expected by the centre.
Henley's director of economic research Paul Ormerod also speculated that in the Nineties lorry traffic could pick up immensely. We could be facing a stable period from which slowly picking up investment could take the world and UK economies into the wealth of the Fifties and Sixties, he said.