, Naught for your juggernaut

Hugh Dykes

Some badly-thinking people might believe tight now that there would be little to choose, in terms of intrinsic undesirability, between giving every traffic warden in the country an OBE (or a CBE?) and allowing lorries to go

1 over thirty-two tons gross weight (the present limit). BUt they would be wrong — dead wrong. Over more than a decade, we have become faMiliar enough with yellow lines and the Parking meter. In comparison, if the Governtent were to concede in Europe that heavier ill

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weights would be permitted (in due Purse, it should be noted, for this is no overProposal, even in Brussels) there would Possibly be the nearest thing we could muster t

°a mass revolt of the people.

,If all this — and the related consequence is Vi '`cePted — then I am running a grave pers,-°nal risk by trying to assert that such public l!ritagonism could, just, be wrong. Not wrong 14'n the absolute sense that an increase in ,.eights, and sizes, at this moment in time " ould be a mistake. But rather in the sense that the logic of the arguments needs re-ex

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ii 5„) taThe officials in Brussels have put on the i.ble that gross vehicle weights should (by go up to 40 tons with a maximum ,s-ngth of 15i metres (against 32 tons gross g,,nd around 15 metres as actual maxima in the uR at the moment). Of the. other Community Members pre-enlargement, most are close to a s°11r Present maxima, but France and Holland tna

-"" out already as allowing their jug

1'31i bi,.ernalas to out-juggernaut other countries' ',.`Igernauts. But as a rough-and-ready terleralisation, which saves space as well as geati-nee, the continent is already used to bigt,.r vehicles than we are. In addition, the ,211e'" r attached to a rigid lorry is a much °1.rCommon continental phenomenon. e se'ut the present tableau and the likely con e of the Brussels recommendations Qahh,.-vaig victory are coloured by a signifi

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shift in the socio-environmental preions of a growing number of the citir of this country. And, for the first time, U IS c wind of change is whispering its way A„erass other EEC countries as well. The -')(ieties within this growing change in at

titudes also engulf the motor car itself — an unheard-of possibility five years ago.

For we are more and more beginning to bite our collective lip in surveying the virtually unrestrained growth of road vehicle traffic in the last two decades, and its environmental effects.

The mind's-eye-view of vehicles lurching along looking for roads to run up and down has swivelled in the other direction completely. Private cars are, in real terms, cheaper now that they were twenty years ago. Mass production, the status drive and ample credit have all seen to that. And with commercial vehicles, the diminishing real price to real incomes relationship has been similar if less pronounced. A big juggernaut can cost many many thousands of pounds, but its productivity has risen startlingly, fuelled by super highways, ample subsidisation by the whole community in a hidden manner and a most attractive fiscal and write-off structure for operators. The old Say's Law in economics is beginning to have a real impact in the national psyche when applied to roads: the supply (roadbuilding) creates its own increasing demand (congestion).

But at this juncture, I suggest with temerity that the arguments of the zealous environment protectors (aren't we all nowadays?) could just be going down the wrong motorway, despite our natural sympathies.

If you take the total number of commercial vehicles in Britain, there has been fast growth in all sectors and sizes, from the bottom up to everything save the biggest. And the rate of growth of numbers of vehicles slows down as a function of their bigger size (whether in net or gross weights, by and large). The heaviest end has grown only moderately in recent years. Contrast this with the pretty explosive rate of increase in the number of cars. There are now 14 million cars, but less than 180,000 big lorries. Nevertheless, it remains pragmatically true (and provable) that the biggest vehicles are the biggest disproportionate nuisance to the community, growingly preoccupied with all kinds of depredations in its environmental surrounds.

What conclusion dare 1 reach?

Put it this way — the patterns, the long-run trends and the necessary solutions must be bound up with a need, yes, to limit maxima in weights and sizes to reasonable ceilings; yes, certainly, to refuse to allow the juggernaut to become the rolling cyclops of the road; yes,. indeed, to re-balance the tattered relationship of the poor old railways to the roads. But there must be an additional approach — in part an alternative; in part a supplementary: device, i new technique. For 'clearly limits set too low for modern conditions and technologies would exert precisely that effect which we have not had at the heaviest end of the lorry range. Namely, the number of such vehicles would start to rise fast again as the economy itself grew.

So is it not relevant to cOnsider the alternative and the supplementary at the same time? If we argue strictly about how big should the biggest be; how heavy is maximum heaviness, and how long is the maximum length, then should we not also say that, whatever the outcome of this argument, we must also examine where heavy lorries will actually penetrate in future years?

Forty tons might be right in due course (although certainly premature for 1973), but where will the 40 tons go? On motorways only? In city centres? In cathedral closes? In leafy lanes?

Let the experts and all the rest of us put our heads together on that one. This is what the Heavy Commercial Vehicles Act, which has now received the Royal Assent, is all about. It will oblige local authorities to work out zone and route schemes for lorries in their areas. Of course, it has to give them time to do this complicated work. But I believe it will help to put Britain in the pioneering van of environment protection in the whole of Europe, not merely in the EEC. Once the provisions of the Act begin to take administrative and regulatory effect at the end of 1976, then the days of free lorry movement anywhere are well and truly over.

And who now — whatever their Party allegiance — can honesty say that similar laws or regulations are not now necessary to curb private cars in city centres?

Hugh Dykes, Conservative MP for Harrow (East), successfully piloted his Private Member's Bill on heavy lorries through Parliament in the session which has just closed.