Comment

Anti-haulier sentiment is never too far from the surface. It re-emerged recently in the East Wall area of Dublin where residents are objecting to the construction of a new euro 20 million railway bridge.

Residents are peddling the line that when the new bridge is completed, trucks which won’t fit in the Dublin Port Tunnel will pass under the East Wall railway bridge en route to the port bringing even more HGV traffic into the area.
The bridge has been struck some 53 times by HGV’s in the last four years and is now in a dangerous state of disrepair. With a height clearance of just 4.57 metres, the bridge is also well short of the regulation height of 5.3 metres.

Iarnród Eireann has stated that the bridge is being replaced in the interests of safety, ensuring the safety of rail travellers on a key artery into Dublin from the north east. The reason why the structure is being raised, is to conform with regulations, not to allow larger vehicles to pass under it.
While residents in the East Wall area of Dublin may have legitimate reasons why the development shouldn’t proceed, the HGV angle is not one of them. It is a red herring that has been thrown in to muddy the waters and cause confusion.

In a similar vein, trucker bashing has now gone Stateside. John Spain, in his column “Ireland Calling” in the Irish Voice tells American readers that “every day in Dublin, an average of 9,000 articulated trucks go right through the city centre, to and from Dublin Port, creating chaos for motorists, polluting the atmosphere and intimidating pedestrians. It is a horrendous problem, and as the Irish economy has boomed in recent years it has got worse and worse.”

He neglected to tell his readers, or perhaps he didn’t know, that the haulage industry has been lobbying for more than a decade for a Port Tunnel. He didn’t tell them the industry has been campaigning for many years to have Dublin Port opened on a 24 hour basis, in order to move freight at off-peak times.

According to Mr Spain, the haulage community should go down on bended knee and thank the Government for the forthcoming Dublin Port Tunnel, which he describes as a “wonderful facility”. However, he says hauliers are not happy because they weren’t consulted during the design stage.

It actually beggars belief that the haulage industry weren’t consulted and asked for an imput. It also beggars belief that Mr Spain cannot see the validity of hauliers’ concerns in relation to height restrictions in the Tunnel.
To compound the problem Mr Spain suggested the Government should “legislate to limit the height of trucks.” He added: “The rest of Europe has already done so. How high are trucks in Ireland going to get?”
He continued: “The Irish Government has caved in to the truckers lobby and there is no height limit on trucks here. We are the only country in the EU in that situation and its a disgrace.”

He also tells his readers that truckers avoid the M50 motorway because they refuse to pay the tolls. There is no disputing the fact that hauliers are against the principle of tolling but there is no hard evidence to back up Mr Spain’s assertion.
In paying to use the M50 motorway, hauliers are trading money for time. The vast majority of hauliers are pragmatic enough to know that paying toll should get them to their destination in a shorter time span.
However, in paying the toll, hauliers demand a high level of service and a cost benefit - time saved - and much to their chagrin, this isn’t always the case. The ongoing peak-time congestion problems at the West Link Toll bridge is a case in point. Hauliers, like other road users, object to paying for the privilege of being stuck in a bottlekneck, as is the case at peak times at the West Link bridge.

The construction of the second bridge at the West Link will alleviate the problem but won’t be completed until late this year. In the interim the Irish Road Haulage Association and the Automobile Association wants the barriers lifted at peak-times to ease the congestion. That is a far cry from avoiding the M50 altogether as Mr Spain has suggested.

With such ill-informed and stilted media exposure, is it any wonder the transport industry has a negative image?