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ommercia
Page 37
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otor VOLUME 133 No. 3415 May 7 1971 :contents A strong case for
the local touch
The report of the PTA's investigation into goods vehicle plating and testing is clearcut and constructive: the scheme as a whole gets a very clean bill of health from operators, the test stations in general get a remarkably strong thumbs up and the recommendations for improvement are clear and well supported by reasoned argument. In essence they boil down to a plea for local administration of the scheme.
The basic complaint is that the Test Centre at Swansea is isolated and remote, and is therefore alien to the generally intimate nature of road transport in which the operator normally has close contact with his customer, with vehicle and parts dealers and even with the local taxation and traffic area staff. The centralized booking system is odd man out, and even with modern communications is not suited to the changes of circumstance which demand the sort of flexibility offered by road transport itself. Practical results of remoteness include scrambled bookings and misunderstandings which would not occur locally.
It is argued very strongly that the test station manager could more easily programme bookings to suit local operators, and so many points raised in the report (not least the vexation caused by the 14-day notice-of-cancellation requirement) would find solution in a local booking system that the DoE must take a serious look at the practicality of such a change. One of the principal objections originally raised to similar suggestions in the infancy of the scheme was that only centralized booking lists could spread the load and provide for bookings to be diverted readily to a second-choice station when demand was high. But the scheme is now working in such a way that 95 per cent of the operators involved in the investigatIon report that they are obtaining bookings at the date, time and place requested. Spreading the load has become a minor factor; and if local-station booking is thought by the DoE to be too isolated, then surely the FTA's alternative suggestion of booking by traffic areas would provide a solution to cover parties needs.