Lorries, potholes, and the campaign to smear cycling

[HoWB Dave]

I have just had an interesting debate on a local Facebook page relating to a low costs street repair in town. Cycling was not involved at all, yet I thought it worth sharing to provide a neat trick to beat the anti-cycling lobby at it's own game.

I pointed out that the damage to local streets is largely caused by lorries. To back this up I linked to research from the Campaign for Better Transport which reported on calculations demonstrating that lorries caused 138,000 times the damage to carriageways as private cars. Needless to say the reaction was quite spectacular - with several involved in the industry willing to take the bait and produce all sorts of straw man arguments, but nobody was willing to challenge this figure of damage being 138,00 that from a small car. Having found this data I calculated that a motorist would have to drive to work for over 12 lifetimes to damage the street as much as the passing of one 44 tonne wagon. I then started to highlight that the car users are paying for the damage to road surfaces caused by lorries, and also for the road works to strengthen the highway from which they as car users will not benefit.

The reason I mention this anecdote is that there appears to be a concerted and, it must be said, successful effort to create animosity between bicycle users and other road users. The attempts to discredit cycleways as causing net pollution is the latest front in this campaign. Rather than simply react to these allegations - and always fight on the back foot - shouldn't we find wedges of our own with which to split the motor lobby?

The disproportionate damage caused by lorries to the public highways is the ammunition us bicycle advocates need. All motorists are aware of the poor condition of the public highways but are not perhaps aware of the role played by heavy lorries in causing carriageway deterioration. If we co-ordinated better with other environmental groups to pre-emptively frame lorries as the reason for poor highway condition and congestion we could spike the motoring lobbies attempts to shift this blame onto the cyclist!

I'd love to hear what seasoned campaigners think!

[atlas_shrugged]

These are excellent points.

How much are lorries paying for Vehicle E. D. is it 138000 times what car users are paying?
Also why are lorries allowed that only see about 60% of the road?

[PH]

I then started to highlight that the car users are paying for the damage to road surfaces caused by lorries, and also for the road works to strengthen the highway from which they as car users will not benefit.

No. we're all paying for that, car users or not.

[geomannie]

I had always thought that everyone knew that road damage was related to about 4 times the axle weight of the vehicle (e.g. http://www.nvfnorden.org/lisalib/getfil ... emid=15860). Lorries/buses do most of the road damage so they they should pay the bulk of the repair costs, but even the heaviest lorries are capped at £1850 VED/year https://tinyurl.com/kxvbnpy. No wonder lorry transport seems cheap compared to rail haulage. There is no subsidy on the track from small, relatively non-destructive vehicles.

[Cyril Haearn]

Trucks must be forced to go much slower

One cannot change the laws of physics

[ANTONISH]

I had always thought that everyone knew that road damage was related to about 4 times the axle weight of the vehicle (e.g. http://www.nvfnorden.org/lisalib/getfil ... emid=15860). Lorries/buses do most of the road damage so they they should pay the bulk of the repair costs, but even the heaviest lorries are capped at £1850 VED/year https://tinyurl.com/kxvbnpy. No wonder lorry transport seems cheap compared to rail haulage. There is no subsidy on the track from small, relatively non-destructive vehicles.

I believe that the impact on the road is related to the fourth power of the axle weight.
i.e double the axle weight produces 16 times the impact.
We have very large lorries now and several times in the past the Road Transport lobby argued for larger lorries on the basis that they would have more axles - therefore reducing impact and that fewer lorries would be needed.
I can remember reading articles on this fifty years ago - my feeling is that the axle weight of lorries today is greater than that of fifty years ago and of course I'm well aware of the reduction in the number of lorries
As for the impact of lorries on the road structure anyone who cycled fifty years ago would be impressed with the mushrooming of pothole numbers.
Filling potholes is only a very temporary solution - the problem is that the road sub structure was never designed for the axle weights that are now on the roads.
I don't know where all this is heading - presumably to the point where our roads are reduced to rubble.
The only answer is for the road transport industry to pay the true cost of maintaining the roads that they are in the process of destroying.

[[XAP]Bob]

But that would make it as expensive as rail...

[Cyril Haearn]

A car causes 138 000 times as much damage as a cycle

[MikeF]

I'm not sure on the maths here; axle weight of car and lorry in the example are 0.5 tonne and 7.44 tonne. That's a 14.88 times difference. 14.88 to power of 4 is 49,024. How is the figure of 138,000 arrived at?

And for a bicycle with an axle weight of 50Kg (heavy person or loaded bike) the difference compared with that car would be 10 times, resulting in a heavy bicycle causes 10,000 times less damage than a small car! Therefore if the "road tax" for the small car is £150 per annum then I should be paying 1.5p per bike per annum road tax. I would be quite happy with that! Shouldn't that satisfy the "you don't pay road tax people"?

Although the article referred to is "pro car and anti lorry" cars also cause significant damage to roads. As an example the road to our nearest Sainsbury's car park is about ¼mile long with a series of flat topped road humps. Drivers approach these too fast so that the car is thrown upwards by the front suspension. The front wheels "land" on the top of the hump. The result is that most of these humps now have dips on the top in the line of the wheel tracks.