POOLING
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in Practice
By a Transport Manager
THE amount of fuel that can be saved by the pooling
of C-licence operators' traffic may well be overestimated if an acceptable standard of service is to be maintained. After reviewing all possible re-arrangements of traffic and routeing, the physical factors involved may well prove insurmountable, however desirable economically.
Despite the rationing of both road-vehicle and industrial fuels, the Government have stressed the necessity of maintaining national productivity at its present level, particularly now that more fuel has to be purchased from dollar areas. To achieve this, trade and industry will still require a high standard of transport service, even though the housewife may have to accept less frequent deliveries.
With maintenance of national productivity in mind the benefit of C-licence operators being able to early one another's goods, either by the granting of shortterm B licences, or by special authority granted to their particular association by the Regional Transport Commissioner, will have limited application, whether they be in short-, mediumor long-distance haulage.
In this context, the term "pooling traffic" is something of a misnomer, as the marrying of specific outward loads with sptcific return loads by interworking between two operators would probably be the most that could be achieved, yather than back-loading from a stock or pool of traffic.
Interworking Impracticable Regarding local work by ancillary users, retail collection and delivery vehicles will already be fully loaded throughout, because of the importance of the prompt return of empties to maintain output. Equally, short inter-factory journeys, often with urgent unpacked semi-processed products, may be so closely allied to a manufacturing time-table that interworking would be impracticable. Where interworking of retail deliveries has been successfully achieved in the past it has been preceded by a detailed reorganization of deliveries requiring considerable time and only then between two companies of exceptional commercial similarities.
Medium-distance journeys of C-licence operators are often of the triangular or circular pattern, rather than the straight out-and-home delivery service. They are invariably fully loaded at the start, gradually unloading and probably empty after three quarters of the day's total mileage, by which time the vehicles will be comparatively near their home base. Even then, an efficient operator would often arrange to collect a load of his own basic material for delivery back to the factory.
It is admittedly in long-distance deliveries that a big reduction in empty running by C-licence operators would at first sight seem possible. But closer examination reveals difficulties if a high standard of service— particularly delivery times—is to be maintained. It has invariably been because of the high standard essential to his particular industry that the trader or manufacturer has operated his own vehicles.
Deliveries to Time-table
Back-loading of the user's own traffic may already be done, but only where it does not interfere with the vehicle's prime purpose of making outward deliveries to a strict time-table. If a highly competitive sales policy places punctual delivery above the economic advantages of back-loading, where possible, to a manufacturer's own factories, it is hardly conceivable that it would be both possible and more convenient to back-load to a neighbouring factory. It could result in having to provide a second vehicle for the next outward delivery where one previously sufficed.
In considering the return loading of C-licence vehicles, it has so far been assumed that they would have platform bodies suitable for general traffic. Of recent years many industries have spent much time and money in developing specialized vehicles for bulk delivery as part of the overall scheme of modernizing methods of manufacture and distribution. Because the vehicles are peculiar to one industry they invariably return empty.
If the elimination of empty running is to be strictly enforced, many ancillary users would not only have to put their most expensive vehicles off the road, but also obtain additional labour, material and possibly factory space to revert to old methods of packing and loading.
There would appear to be no ground for the tacit assumption, in recent demands for pooling traffic, that an efficient ancillary transport organization has not already made every possible operational economy up to —but not beyond—the point where further economies. would so reduce the standard of service that they would be more than offset by resulting losses in other directions.