Safe Speed Forums

5 DAYS IS ALL IT NEEDS TO BRING THIS COUNTRY TO ITS KNEES

http://nationaltruckweek.co.uk/life_without_lorries.pdf (warning, pdf file is 23 pages)

5 days people. Thats all it takes to completely screw up this country if
we decided to repeat the strike of 1979. Rail drivers get £30k a year. Why? because they have the GUTS to go out on strike and stay there until they get what they want.


Day 1. All movements of lorries over 3.5t stops at 12.am
========================================================

Most mail services and parcel deliveries stop.
No newspapers.
Manufacturers operating on just in time basis suspend operations.
No supplies of fresh produce in grocery outles.

Day 2
=====
Supermarket stocks of many perishable/short shelf life product run out
including milk, bread and eggs.
Farmers start dumping milk on farms.
Shortage of cash at ATM machines.
Construction work on most building sites cease.
Growth in farmers markets!!

Day 3
=====
Most petrol stations run out of fuel.
Around 15% of cars without fuel.
Supermarket stocks of fast moving groery lines exhausted.
Fast food outlets close.
Widespread layoffs from manufacturing sector.
Busier pubs run out of beer.
Slaughter of poultry on farms.

Day 4
=====
Petrol stations run dry.
Most of the manufacturing sector shut down.
Most non-electrified rail services suspended.
Serious cash shortages.
Bus companies reduce off peak/rural services.
Gas and Water utilities disrupted by lack of fuel and spare parts.
Congestion at ports stops offloading of vessels.

Day 5
=====
Half of all cars without fuel.
Large proportion of UK workforce laid off or unable to get to work.
Retail stocks of most grocery products exhausted.
Almost all manufacturing closed down.
Severe disruption of the Health Service.
Serious problems from the accumulation of waste.
Range of non food products in shops substantially depleted.

_________________
Semper in excreta, nur quantitat variat.

Try posting this on he T2000 message board...

_________________
Speed camera policy Kills

Seems a great way to make trains economic competition to road transport again...

You'll still need a truck until you get a railway line to every door!

to think that rail would ever be used more than HGV haulage is pure fantasy. it'll NEVER happen. HGVs are the life-blood of this country whether you like them or not.

I don't really care how things are transported, so long as it's cheap. If hgvs start becoming more and more expensive, I assume that railfreight will become more economical in comparison. That's the point I'm trying to make. I have no idea whether increasing driver's wages to thirty grand will make lorries uneconomic, but it has to have some effect.

Yeah, and they said of the Model T Ford it'd NEVER usurp the horse and cart.

I know drivers who wouldn't get out of bed for 30 grand!

March 2005, see's the introduction of further restrictions on drivers hours, thus increasing the need to run more trucks & drivers.

This increases running cost's and employment cost's = more cost to consumers, on everything you buy.



What rail freight would that be

The truck cannot be replaced by rail, ever seen a train pulling into your local supermaket or hospital



Wages are being increased as drivers can only be paid for 48 hrs per week maximum. That is, if you can get a driver in the first place, which is hard now, yet alone when we need another 20% in March.

Economic or not, their is NO alternative to the Truck

_________________
Steve

Completley correct

A typical Artic driver, is responsible for the £100,000 + truck/trailer he is driving + the load they are carrying.

I know alot of people believe a truck driver is all about sitting behind a steering wheel.

Their is rather alot more to it than that, the goods do not jump on & off the back of the truck by themselves. That 16 speed G/box is somewhat harder work than a 5 speed car, putting up with the lunatics on the road, i do not mean just the trip home from work, i mean living with it, in a 15 metre truck.

If your Boss gave you a Tool at work worth the value of the truck, what would you expect to be payed in return

_________________
Steve

We obvioulsy need trucks, as rail lines don't run to super markets. Hows this for an idea. Make massive HGV trains. Have dedicated roll on and off points for trucks sort of like the channel tunnel. This way the trucks roll onto a train, and roll off close to their final destination.
This would reduce the amount of trucks on our moroways, and avoid the spectacle of 1 truck overtaking another with a 0.00001mph passing speed.

_________________
'Detritus, get yer stoney arse over ere'

Sounds like a good plan to me!

Tesco's and Eddie Stobart at Daventry already do this to trunk trailers up to Scotland.
Eddie even has his own train set to play with.

_________________
Semper in excreta, nur quantitat variat.

Fine. Now we just need to calculate:

a) the number of trains we'd need to transport all those trucks

b) the amount of extra track we'd need to accommodate all those trains

c) how many depots we'd need

d) how long it would take to load/unload the trains

e) how much parking area we'd require at each depot for trucks waiting to be transported

f) how many extra local roads we'd need to avoid congestion caused by trucks funnelling into and out of the depots.

g) how much fuel the trains are going to use, in comparison to what the trucks would use travelling by road.

Better still, build more motorways and get rid of the speed limiters.

Regards
Peter

But if you can fit the HGV's into the trains, and the trains into the tunnels then surely you can get rid of the trains............

Anyone for rail-to-road ping-pong?

_________________
http://www.itsyourduty.org.uk

Probably a few, but there is alot of rolling stock around that isn't being used to full capacity.



The railway network is underused at the moment, it just (ha!) needs completely new tracks and a decent management!



A few again, but there's plenty of space left over from when trains were actually invested in (unused sidings, derelict stations etc...). Pretty much all brownfield sites too.



I think the point was they would be roll on, roll off, as the Chunnel is, so the transfer would take very little time. The major effort involved would be loading the HGVs in the first place. No doubt lessons could be learnnt from cross channel ferries too.



Would depend on the management system, if transfers were organised HGVs would drive into the depot and straight on the train (sorry, idealistic again!).



But the motorways would be empty!



They would be moving more mass so maybe more fuel would be used, however the power would come from one source (single diesel engine/electricity), so efficiences may suggest otherwise.



Build more motorways and people will build more vehicles, it's a bit of a viscious circle. I thought the point was to get HGVs off roads and allow more space for private vehicle use.

Thinking about it, I have seen HGVs and trains carrying shipping containers. I'd imagine this would be faster than unloading a trains contents onto lorries using pallets and forklift.

I've never found this very convincing. Construction of new motorways and major roads has been very low in recent years. Don't know about the rest of the country but the last major road project I can think of near me was the Newbury Bypass. Before that it was the M25! Other construction seems to be either upgrades or repairs. But while we're not building much in the way of major new routes traffic is going up anyway. Morning jams on the northbound M3 have got worse in the last few years. In 1997 I used to be able to get to from J4 to J2(the M25 interchange) in 10 minutes. Last time I did this trip, which was before the current M25 roadworks started, it took about 20 minutes. It's got to the point where they've put nice cheery signs up warning of congestion for 11 miles.

I think it's far more likely that traffic growth is related to affordability and necessity than how much road space there is, so things like where people work are going to have a bigger impact on traffic growth. On a local scale I suspect where people live is important as well. For example, I'm sure that some of the extra traffic on the M3 is down to new residential areas going up further south along the motorway. Presumably the people who moved in there used to go a different way to get to work, or worked somewhere else.

_________________
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

You're right Gatsobait, it was a bit of a generalisation, what I was trying to say was that the more investment that is put into one mode of transport (i.e. roads and what uses them), the less is going to be put into others (railways in this example).

As you say, there haven't been many new roads built recently, yet the investment in vehicles has now been so great that a lot of the roads that do exist cannot cope. The solution, invest public money in more roads, or invest public money in other forms of transport, thus lowering the amount/size of vehicles on the roads that are around.

I think the latter is probably the best way to go, others disagree, but as things are going something needs to change or everything will be gridlocked (at least in most urban areas).

Day 6
=====

The sleeping beauty, Dratsabati, finally wakes from his dream.
He realises that truck drivers are paid the market rate.
If that is low, it is because there are too many of them,
competing for the same work. If they don't like it,
they can find another line of work. Like everybody else
has to!

_________________
I stole this .sig

Fair enough. Do we have any idea what the relative amounts of invetment are? And more importantly, can anyone shed any light on the ROI?

I don't think it's so much investment as affordability. The gap between rich and poor used to decide who could have a car and who couldn't. The gap is still there, but the availabilty and choice of cars has grown massively, most of which has been at the cheap end. Or do you mean that manufacturers have invested money in producing cheaper cars?

I think the latter is what's been tried over much of the last decade, and it doesn't seem to have helped much. Absolutely there is a case for making public transport good enough to tempt people off the road, but that should not come at the cost of neglecting the roads. All we seem to be able to do at the moment is to make public transport slightly less hellish in some circumstances than driving. Forgive the pun, but that's no way to run a railroad. The car is transport of choice for the vast majority. It is always more flexible than public transport, and always will be. It is almost always more comfortable too, even allowing for congestion.

FWIW I think we need to move away from this idea that cars and public transport are competitors and start thinking about how the two could co-operate to allow all of us to complete our journeys with the maximum efficiency and minimum inconvenience. IMO this should mean expecting many journeys to be completed entirely be car, many to be begun by car but to switch to public transport at some stage, a small number to be entirely on public transport and a very small number to be on foot. For example (personal experience):

• Bus stops and train stations are spread out and can only cater for a certain number of possible journeys. Passengers also travel according to the timetable which might not meet their convenience. For this reason many people will choose the car. Reps probably don't have a choice - only the car allows the flexibility. Same applies for some other occupations, especially tradespeople. It's hard enough getting a plumber - you wouldn't appreciate being told "Nah mate, too far from the station, see?":lol:
• One journey I've done many times to various parts of London is to drive to Hatton Cross where there's a tube station and a cheap car park, get the Piccadilly line into the city, change as necessary, get to the last station and walk maybe half a mile at most. Not too expensive and relatively painless, though the overcrowding on the tube in a hot summer has got grim enough to make me drive all the way on hot days. That aside, it shows that the two can work together. The only necessity is that sufficient parking be made available at the outer stations, which isn't always the case. The other problem is that the tube is pretty much at capacity at peak times and possibly couldn't handle much more.
• If you are fortunate enough to live near a bus stop or train station and the routes available meet your needs, then public transport may be the more attractive option. There's a lot that needs sorting out though, timekeeping not least. We don't so it doesn't apply to us. My Dad could, just about. He'd need to walk more than a mile though, and at his age I doubt he's keen.
• On a nice day I might walk to Tesco, but only if I needed just the one bag of shopping. Other than that the only journey I'm likely to do on foot is to the bloke who services my car. If it's nice I'll be on foot one way. If it's chucking down the missus and I will sort out lifts.

_________________
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein