Call for attack on road planners
Page 15
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ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS and the road transport industry spend too much time fighting each other. Instead, their combined forces should be aimed at the road planners.
This was the conclusion of a heated 90-minute debate between Mr K. Meyer of Transport 2,000 and members of the Southern Owner Drivers association at a meeting in Slough last week.
Mr Meyer, chairman of the North London and Home Counties division of Transport 2000, stressed that he was speaking only as a representative of his particular division.
He said he agreed with the Owner Drivers Association that driving a lorry through many large towns, particularly London, was often a nightmare because of inadequate roads and too much traffic.
As the association said, if the road planners could get organised and build decent roads away from towns, then lorry drivers would gladly use them.
The M25 London orbital route should have been built years ago, one driver said. "As it stands now," he said, "completion date is still two years off and I doubt if even that schedule will be kept."
Until the orbital route is completed, lorries will have to continue to drive through London to get to many destinations in the south, the association said. So, meantime, the car drivers should be educated as to how to drive properly.
Many traffic jams could be attributed to cars darting from one side of the road to the other to try and gain a few yards. If they were to sit back and wait, the congestion would clear more quickly, it said.
One of the many points the association and Mr Meyer disa
greed strongly over was the environmental merits of the railway over the lorry.
One of the association's .owner drivers from South Wales said that trains were much more of a nuisance because of their noise and vibration. Trains often travelled nearer to houses than lorries and went at faster speeds causing more vibrations.
Moving onto legislation affecting the transport industry, Mr Meyer had a difficult time trying to persuade the association that under-runners and spray suppressors were to be welcomed.
"Every time new legislation ,comes out, it is the lorry driver that has to dig deep into his pockets to buy gadgets that supposedly give car drivers a safer time," one member said. If car drivers want a safer drive, then they should help pay for it, he added.
The meeting, which had been advertised in a local Slough newspaper, was open to the public, and representatives from the Road Haulage Association and Freight Transport association had been invited. Unfortunately, Mr Meyer ended up speaking to an audience of 15, all members of the Southern Owner Drivers Association.