IrocIA -v -v
Page 45
Page 44
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
tatistics can be made to prove anything. There is a general perception that traffic congestion is getting worse, but just what do we mean by
congestion? "The problem with measuring congestion is that there is no actual definition of what congestion is and there's no real measure of congestion," says Daniel Firth, information manager of the British Road Federation, the organisation which represents road users and providers. "Because there are so many definitions out, it's very easy to just say it's growing, it's reducing or it's staying still, It all depends on what you base it on."
The Department of Transport says that traffic growth is slowing: it's now growing at compared with an average of 1.7% over 1998 and 1999.
However, the AA's latest Gridlock Gauge a quarterly measure of hold-ups—says that delays after an incident have grown by 37% since 1997. 'These results are much worse than we expected," says John Dawson, the AA's policy director. "What is clear is that with ever more traffic on the roads, the
impact of incidents is getting worse and taking longer to clear."
Then again, the findings published by the DOT in its Journey Times Survey 1999—Inner and Central London—says: "Between 1993 and 1999...car journey times have increased only marginally."
So if there is no definitive national measure of congestion, is anyone looking at the costs? Not, it seems, the DOT. "The DOT doesn't put a figure on it in the first instance; we think it's impossible to work out the cost of congestion," says a spokesman. The Confederation of British Industry reckons it costs British industry between £15 and f2obn a year, but this figure has been extrapolated from an estimate it made in 1989.
Meanwhile, on the roads, British hauliers are gritting their teeth and getting on with it. "It's like the British weather—you put up with it," says Huw Price, office manager of east London-based Edwin Shirley Trucking. The company regularly delivers to conference venues in the centre of the city and all over town. "Wasn't there a wonderful figure about the average speed of the horsedrawn traffic in London being about four or five miles an hour? Well we're not there yet!" he quips.
The biggest problem facing urban hauliers is the increasingly Draconian parking restrictions enforced by local authorities, which Price estimates is a very lucrative business. "When you think of Westminster and The City Of London making f5m or Lion each out of parking fines they don't give a monkey about the fine that they slap on you because you're delivering to a meeting in the City," he says.
Alistair Adie is director of London-based Art Move, which delivers and collects works of art in and around the city. "It's not congestion in itself," he says. "It's more difficulties of access that have changed for the worse. More than 50% of alterations in traffic and parking regulations are politically and financially motivated— they are there just to piss off the driver and decrease traffic."
But Adie fears that dispensations for commercial vehicles would only lead to abuse of the system: "You don't want all the people that buy four-wheel-drive vehicles to drive the kids to school buying Transit vans... Harvey Nichols would be completely surrounded!' he laughs.
It's not only London hauliers who are hit by the school run. Karen Hodgson, managing director of Teesport-based Haulageiink, says that it is her biggest headache: "Coming through Middlesbrough it can make a difference of half an hour. The minute they are all off the road it's no problem getting in and about."
With this in mind the company schedules its operations to avoid the daytime jams. "It can save an hour or two a day by having the trucks already at a delivery or collection point the night before," says Hodgson.
Also based in the North-East is John Harland, who finds that if he hits Cleveland at the wrong time he too falls foul of the dreaded school run, "If you time it right, about quarter past eight in the morning, you can drive into Cleveland and drive straight through on the A66," he says. At five past or twenty past you're stuck in traffic." But Harland warns that there are no easy solutions: "I don't see a way round it. What are they going to do? Build double-deck roads if there's no room on the floor to put more roads?"
However, in Glasgow, Jim Macauley, managing director of Cadzow Heavy Haulage, blames the poor state of the roads on the lack of spending. "My main complaint is the lack of completed junctions and bypasses round all those little villages," he says. "If they would spend only another 25% of the money that they are extorting from transport companies they would sort out all the problems with traffic in this country."
At the national level Securicor Omega Express has to keep manipulating the departure times of its daily trunking operations to take into account the growing hold-ups around the M i/M6 and M25/M4 blackspots. "From Hatfield, where our central distribution depot is, it can take 40 minutes longer to Bristol if the truck departs during the rush hour than if it departs later at night," says Andy Pagram, general manager of operations. The company has to operate to tight windows to provide its timed services, and having vehicles standing on congested motorways forces up its costs.
"At the moment we absorb as much as we can in order to stay competitive," says Pagram. But how long the company can go on taking congestion costs on the chin without passing them on to its customers is uncertain.
For local distribution the company's 3,000-plus fleet offight vehicles takes over and another set of headaches appears. With the increasing fashion for the pedestrianisation of town centres, Securicor finds that its clients are closed off to it for most of the working day, forcing it to flood a town centre with additional vehicles early on.
"Of course, if we're actually putting more vehicles into an area during the rush hour and early times this is contributing to the congestion," says Pagram. "Nighttime deliveries and collections get tightened up because of pressure from residents. We are between a rock and a hard place."
In December Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott outlined the government's io-year plan for transport, in which he says he wants to see a healthy freight sector.
"The bulk of our goods goes by road, so we are committed to a competitive, thriving road transport sector," he says. To this end, i.4bn is set to be spent on major trunk road schemes over the next seven years and this summer the government will publish its plans for "a comprehensive programme for change, mapping out an investment programme through to zoio".
Prescott reckons he has the answers; hauliers will have to wait and see—usually sitting in a traffic jam—if he's right.