Haulage Jobs and the Great Road Row

Back in old days, those working on haulage jobs could avoid much of the nation’s traffic congestion by simply driving outside of main rush-hour periods. Those days are now a fading memory in many parts of the country.

Our great motorways are now, in some cases, more or less jammed-up virtually 24hours a day. One only has to think about the M6 through the West Midlands, the M1 just about anywhere along its entire length, or the notorious M25 car park to know the truth of that.

Of course, the problems are worse in some parts of the UK than others. Certainly the South East, Midlands, industrial Yorkshire or the Manchester-Liverpool conurbations are appallingly congested but it’s bad elsewhere too – as you’ll know if you’ve tried driving along the M4 in the west or between Glasgow and Edinburgh etc.

Those involved in haulage jobs hate all this congestion more than most because it’s crippling their business and profitability. Nobody is going to pay more because it now takes on average 3 hours to cover a distance that 10-15 years ago might have taken 1 hour. So, what can be done to possibly make the life of those who do haulage jobs for a living easier?

Well, the easy answer is to build more roads or enhance those we already have. That, however, is fraught with difficulties, as the apparently never-ending debates over the second ‘outside London’ Thames crossing and airport expansion projects illustrate.The problem arising from the core of these debates is three-fold.

• In many parts of the UK and notably the South-East, there just isn’t any more room to build – at least not without destroying lots of what little green space is left and uprooting large numbers of businesses and homes in the process. For example, people are already pointing out that Heathrow expansion would increase traffic volumes hugely but the existing roads already can’t cope and are regularly jammed – yet there’s nowhere to build new ones.
• Some parts of the country are becoming very badly affected by poor air quality due to mass traffic volumes.
• New and bigger roads don’t solve the problem. If you doubt that, look at the multi-lane sections of the M25, which replaced the old dual-lane stretches. They’re now regularly just as jammed as before.

The problem is, of course, that there are simply too many people, cars and commercial vehicles in too small an area (or several areas). Even the most unrealistically optimistic forecasts for road building show that there is never going to be enough capacity to meet demand and a growing population. So, what can be done?

It’s possible to talk nobly about using the rail network more for freight and increasing public transport to get people out of their cars. However, those initiatives might have only a marginal effect on the problem, even in very optimistic scenarios. Yes, we can keep castigating successive governments and that’s great fun, but it’s hard to see practically what they can do about the problem.

It may be that draconian measures will be required in due course. Perhaps scheduling road usage through certain hours by commercial then private vehicles might have a role to play. We might also have to start restricting private car and commercial vehicle use based upon some criteria yet to be defined.

Ultimately though, it may be necessary to move business and populations around the country more to spread the traffic volumes more evenly. That, though, smacks of social engineering and won’t be popular with anyone.

It might be that permanently jammed roads will be an on-going fact of life for haulage jobs in the future.

Norman Dulwich is a correspondent for Haulage Exchange, the world's largest neutral trading hub for same day haulage jobs in the express freight exchange industry. Over 2,500 transport exchange businesses are networked together through their website, trading jobs and capacity in a safe 'wholesale' environment.

Writer and Online Marketing Manager in London.