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164 
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Page 83
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OFTEN one gets the impression that there is a railway school of letter-writing. Seldom does a day pass without one or more newspapers publishing in their correspondence columns a contribution praising one aspect or other of the railways, usually at the expense of road transport. The style, the strategy and even the content of the letters have a strong family resemblance. They tend to work up their theme from a mere phrase or two in a previously published
letter or article.
Once the stimulus has taken effect the subsequent effusion seems to flow like a piece of automatic writing.
According to the experts, letter-writing is a dying art. One is tempted to speculate how it has managed to survive with apparently undiminished vigour among these exponents of what some people might consider a lost cause. They may be superannuated railwaymen who have taken their single-minded dedication into retirement with them. They may be the lingering relicts of the numerous railway organizations which flourished in the past.
Alternatively they may be members of a still active body. It was not so long ago that the railways decided to cease their financial support of an association ostensibly devoted to the interests of transport in general.
Same arguments
Certain arguments tend to recur in the letters. The explanation may be that many of them are written by the same person: some of the writers' names have become familiar to regular readers. A more entertaining idea is that there is somewhere a master Epistolarian, a Svengali of the permanent way, and that the individuals who put their names to the letters merely do as he tells them.
His methods are those of the skilled if sometimes unscrupulous debater. He chooses plausible assertions which can become the subject of strong argument, but which it is remarkably difficult either to prove or to disprove conclusively.
He takes the points of the other side and stands them on their head so that to the deluded eye they almost appear to be in his favour. He scatters statistics with a liberal hand, preferably those which it is impossible to verify or confute from the usual books of reference.
In the hands of the master the track-costs controversy can be developed until it almost appears that road users are paying virtually nothing and are being financially supported by the railways. The double-entry method can be used effectively to this end. The road user suffers from congestion and many other disadvantages. The cost to him can be calculated in various ways, none of them particularly accurate.
Let us suppose it amounts to £1,000m a year. He imagines that the greater part of this burden, which he has to bear, is the consequence of an inadequate road system: if proper roads were built the cost might be halved or reduced even further.
Correspondents from the other camp, instead of agreeing that the road user is paying for the deficiencies of the road system, argue that he should be taxed to pay for such deficiencies. This contention, so consistently advanced, has acquired respectability even among economists.
Practical politics
A system of road-pricing which will make the motorist pay for the congestion he causes to other people may yet become practical politics. Nobody has suggested that the motorist ought in equity to be entitled to compensation for the congestion which other people cause to him. He loses on the roundabouts as well as the swings.
On other occasions the productivity method can be found useful. Road transport is accused of the extravagant use of space and manpower.
The picture used to support this contention is of the train drawing several hundred tons with only a couple of men on board as compared with the fleet of lorries needed to carry the same volume of traffic.
There are many times more people involved in various aspects of road transport than are employed by the railways. Therefore the ratio of rail productivity must be higher, and it is "high time Mrs. Castle forced the public to come to its senses and use the railways".
As this is an assertion dressed up as an argument there is no effective way of answering it. So much depends upon what is carried and in what circumstances.
Unless the place of origin and the destination both happen to be sidings road vehicles must be used at each end of the journey and the intensive use of handling staff may be required.
The container and the Freightliner have been developed to minimize this problem. It is alarmingly easy to over-exaggerate their advantages. They have certainly given the letter-writers a new lease of life. Wilder flights of fancy are reserved for occasional use. They may conveniently be classified as the AASHO method from the American Association of State Highway Officials who began it all.
One of many conclusions reached from tests carried out by AASHO was that the extent of the damage caused to a road by a vehicle increased at a rate represented by the fourth power of the vehicle's weight.
On this basis a two-ton van causes 16 times as much damage as a car weighing a ton. Similarly a three-ton lorry is 81 times more destructive than the car and five times more than the van.
What friend of the railways with a taste for mathematics could resist this? It did not take long to work out that a vehicle with a gross weight of 20 tons was pulverizing the roads at a rate equivalent to 160,000 cars. With the weight of 32 tons the ratio was just over a million to one.
What consequences flowed from all this were not clear. Presumably if a single car caused one shilling's worth of damage in the course of a year—it is difficult to suppose the amount could be less—the motorist could discharge his debt to society with a shilling and the owner of the 32-tonner would have to pay £50,000.
The annual compensation to the community from the owner of a special-type vehicle weighing as little as 100 tons with its load would be L50m. A few such vehicles and the entire cost of the roads as well as the deficits of the railways would be met.
This, of course, would be based on the assumption that such vehicles would not have completely annihilated the roads in the meantime, as would surely happen if each one was doing 1,000m. times as much damage as a private car.
Critical analysis
The AASHO findings and more particularly the assumptions based on them have not been generally accepted and have been subjected to a long and critical analysis by a team of experts sponsored by the International Road Transport Union.
What the public might think a more important point is that the statistics are obviously absurd. The letter-writers who use them may hold the same opinion, but are satisfied to have sown the idea of the comparison even if the precise ratio is in doubt.
Janus