Road bans are a road to ruin

The much maligned road haulage industry has taken a hammering from several quarters in the recent past. An economic slowdown, spiralling fuel prices, escalating insurance premiums and virtually stagnant rates are just some of difficulties facing the industry on a daily basis. To compound matters, there is a growing lobby that wants to confine HGV movements to the national roads network. John Loughran reports.

Many European countries have specific bans on heavy goods vehicles entering towns and villages. These bans are widely enforced, to the point where a lorry driver caught breaking the ban, could have his vehicle confiscated and face a heavy fine.

In Ireland no such bans exist, because the relative infrastructure required to support them is not in place. However, in the bowels of government, at national and local level, there is a school of thought, that supports this philosophy.

On environmental, traffic and road safety grounds, supporters of this school of thought argue that there is no place for HGVs in towns, villages and non-national roads. They can't answer the pertinent question: Just how are the goods going to arrive in the shops of these towns and villages and rural areas?

They don't need to explain or fully think through their beliefs because it has a mass market appeal. Nobody likes being stuck behind an articulated lorry on a narrow country road. Nobody wants to hear the sound of HGVs trundling through the streets of our towns and villages in the early hours of the morning. They adopt the NIMBY approach - not in my back yard.

Transport Minister Seamus Brennan was the first high profile politician to articulate his feelings. In fact, he went much further and warned that a ban on HGV traffic entering Dublin city centre will be put in place when the Dublin Port Tunnel is finally completed in 2005.
"There is no point spending more than £700 million on the Dublin Port Tunnel if the trucks won't use it. I have come to the conclusion that an across the board ban on trucks is the only way forward," the Minister quipped.

Dublin City Council is also in favour of a ban on HGV traffic in the city centre. On its official website, www.dublincity.ie it states: "It has been suggested that over height HGVs will have unrestricted access to the city's road network, thereby undermining one of the fundamental objectives of the Dublin Port Tunnel, the removal of port HGV traffic from the city's road network."

It continues: "It is important to state that over height vehicles will have only limited alternative surface access available to them. A city wide HGV management strategy will be introduced to accompany the opening of the Dublin Port Tunnel. This will place severe restrictions on when and where HGVs will be permitted to operate within the city."
Once the ban is implemented in Dublin, it will only be a matter of time before cities such as Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Galway follow suit.

These cities all suffer from chronic traffic congestion at peak times, and the road haulage industry will be seen as a soft target.
Rightly or wrongly, the road haulage industry will have to pay the price for inadequate public transport, increased private car ownership, and the lack of investment in our roads infrastructure.

The persecution of the road haulage sector probably won't stop with HGV bans being placed in all the major cities. Smaller towns and villages could be similarly affected and there may come a time when hauliers will be faced with the prospect of making deliveries to small warehousing facilities outside urban areas.

Fleets of courier size vans could be utilised to make the deliveries within the urban areas. Now that makes environmental and economic sense doesn't it. Adding thousands of vehicles to the national fleet, will also greatly improve road safety and traffic congestion, won't it?
Most hauliers would readily admit they take the shortest and most time effective route from A to B. That may mean diverting away from national routes and urban areas to avoid the worst ravages of the traffic.

Hauliers contribute vast sums of money every year to the government coffers through excise duty on diesel, road tax and road tolls. They have a right, except where weight restrictions exist to plan and choose there route.

However, the haulage industry is now being accused of creating "rat-runs" on non-national routes in counties Meath, Kildare, Dublin, Louth and Wicklow to avoid traffic congestion.
The fact that haulage is a customer-led industry and reacts to their needs is totally ignored. Hauliers carry out the delivery requests of their paymasters. That may involve delivering to sites on non-national roads.

If Ireland is to adopt the European model, it must have the same high levels of infrastructure. High levels of public transport, an efficient roads network at both national and non-national level and a viable freight alternative will be required.

The National Development Plan is moving in the right direction in relation to some of these issues, but Ireland is still light years away from reaching the standards achieved by our near European neighbours.
In the mean time our planners would be advised not to put the cart before the horse.