Patience comrades; the only way to survive silly season is to remain calm as determined holiday-makers start the great get away in a variety of wheeled vehicles. For many parts of the British Isles tourism is the primary source of income and the lifeblood of the community. The professional services group Deloitte valued UK tourism at £127billion a year, generating 3.1 million jobs, and accounting for 10% of the overall employment.
London is top of the pile with sightseers spending more than £25billion followed by the Home Counties, which enjoys a residue benefit. Third and fourth on the list, generating more than £9billion each, are the south-west and the north-west of England. Cornwall, which is a perfect example, has an economy more in common with eastern European countries than neighbouring counties. Natives are more likely to be working in the retail/tourist sectors, be self-employed or rely on welfare than other part of the UK. This is down to losing indigenous industries, and a rise in second home ownership and house prices. While you might argue over the nuances of Cornwall’s plight I am sure we can both agree that tourism worth £9.7billion a year across the entire south-west is vitally important. The only problem with tourism is that the buggers with the money need to travel there to spend it. Yes, silly season is upon us. The effect of national holidays on local residents and traditional road users is titanic. All roads become clogged quadrupling journey times during which the are-we-there-yet window lickers test the patience of saints. For us seasoned travellers, every Friday afternoon falls into the ‘silly season’ category as people try to get home for the weekend. We know the pinch points. With a bit of planning and no small amount of luck delays can be avoided. Add determined holidaymakers to the mix and all bets are off. Incomprehensible tailbacks appear as car-towing-caravans crawl along at 40mph and motorhomes inching around every bend at 25mph to avoid the vase in the back window toppling over. Each creating their own specific traffic update on local radio stations. The worst offender is the top-box, bike-carrying, high-performance tractor. Their back window blocked out with Waitrose bags stuffed with imported coffee beans, tofu and Italian wine. All careen at breakneck speed to four-bedroom detached summer residences in a picturesque villages with kids freshly collected from boarding school and plugged in to their screens. Time is money. Overtaking, undertaking, cutting up traffic, barging their way through country lanes... Silly season officially kicks off at Easter. Semi-savvy holidaymakers hit the road after work on Thursday night but many try a dawn departure on Good Friday. By 9am the roads are slow and ponderous, by lunch time they’re as good as closed. With more retail and wholesale businesses ignoring national holidays, truck drivers usually have to be shrewd enough to ensure book time off for Easter months in advance. All-too-often truckers heading home find themselves marooned 40 miles from home on a Friday night after spending the last four hours and 30 minutes bumper-to-bumper going nowhere slowly. They run in Saturday morning and then relive same experience on Easter Monday as everyone attempts to go home in a timely fashion. Two May bank holidays and half-terms follow where the Thursday night/Friday rule applies too. Truck drivers employ their greater knowledge of the road network to circumnavigate 20-mile queues but a word of warning, if you know about it, the ‘alternative route’ option on the sat-nav knows it too. If an extra few hours sitting it out on the motorway can be tolerated it’s better than being stuck on an A-road off-piste with 35 miles to go and only 15 minutes driving time left. The six-week break sees silly season spread liberally over 42 days as tourists manoeuvre their chemical lunchbox on wheels and open-plan-vans through alien environments led by sat-navs, old road atlases and blind courage. After decades of enduring silly season my only advice is to be patient. Employ the virtue in buckets because you will be tested. It’s better to get home in one piece than any of the alternatives; road rage caught on a dashcam, police involvement and statements, insurance claims, official warnings and even losing your job. So if you are stuck behind a plastic shed doing 56mph spare a thought and consider that the driver might just be me.
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Essential news that keeps you warm at night Stories. Top ones. On the day transport disappeared into a sinkhole... Man buys truck A haulier desperate to collect and deliver freight has bought a lorry to collect and deliver freight. Trevor Rovert, the boss of the eponymously named haulage company, said the decision to buy a lorry to collect and deliver freight for is a game-changer for the company. ‘Buying a lorry to collect and deliver freight is a game-changer for the company,’ he said, ‘because we’ll be able to use the lorry to collect and deliver freight.’ Going into details Mr Rovert said he’d bought ‘a wooden one’. TRAVEL NEWS The British Motorway network is to go on display at the Museum of Science and Industry next year. The Department for Transport and Highways England have advised motorists to find alternative routes until the motorways are returned in 2022. NEWS IN BRIEF BREXIT NEWS EU demand British government replace all its ‘cul-de-sac’ signs or face having a tariff placed on the French signs. INSURANCE NEWS Goods in Transit is to be renamed Goods on The Move following a legal challenge by Ford. TAX NEWS HMRC said it takes any loop hole seriously. AMERICAN NEWS North American truck manufacturer PeteFreightStar is to put a kitchen sink next to the gun rack in its new Winnebago-style truck so truckers with blood on their hands can wash it off. SPECIAL TRANSPORT FEATURE REPORT Cross border solution? By Rob Berry Irish hauliers are trialling a potential post-Brexit solution for moving freight between Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland without reintroducing a hard border. Hauliers have united with farmers to transport cargo on cows in cross-border fields and waiting for them to be milked before unloading them. Speaking exclusively to Today's Cargo Newsflash, dairy farmer Patrick acknowledged the ambitious plan was ambitious. ‘It’s an ambitious plan,’ he said. Patrick revealed that importing cloven-hoofed animals the farmer only need a permit for importation from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. ‘There is nothing written about carrying freight, so we pin the permit on the cows arse in case an inspector is on the farm. ‘We load the cows with freight when they’re being milked in the morning then turn them loose into the field then in the afternoon they venture across the border to another farm and are milked in the evening. ‘There my colleague, Pádraig, unloads the cows onto waiting trucks before reloading the cows after milking and sending them back into the fields for the night trunk back across the border. In the morning we milk the cows as usual and unload/load the freight…it’s a win-win.’ Refusing to be drawn on the trial a government spokesperson on Brexit said in a statement that ‘Brexit means Brexit’. We all knew the snow was coming but most hauliers sent their trucks out anyway, after all, if a few made it through it would all be worth it. I’ll be honest, I was lucky. In Scotland all day Monday and Tuesday morning ahead of the snow storms delivered by ‘the beast from the east’ home Tuesday night.
On Wednesday morning the Boss parked up the trucks yet to leave the yard and sent word to those on the road to ‘use their common sense’ (that is another story in itself). Big Dave acknowledged the advice. Out on the M62 he headed for Hartshead Moor Services and parked up. Being a man known not to travel lightly he fired up the night heater and began making his way through his food parcel, I say parcel it’s more like a food pallet. While Big Dave was eating his own bodyweight in microwavable dinners, stories began to emerge of stranded motorists being helped out by lorry drivers and local residents. On the M8 and M80 lorry drivers kept engines running and used the night heater to keep fellow stranded motorists warm with residents bringing food and drink to keep people going. This was repeated on the M6 in Cumbria, the M5 in Devon and the M62 near Brighouse. One truck driver went a step further, Jon Gowing opened up the back of his Greggs wagon and began handing out doughnuts, vanilla slices and cakes for fellow motorists stuck at Lindisfarne, Northumberland on the A1 (Daily Mirror). However, the blame game has already started with Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon accusing hauliers and transport companies of sending their trucks out on the road despite the ever red weather warning from the Met Office (Scottish Daily Record). She said ‘there were far more HGVs on that road than there should have been when a red warning was in place’ and that ‘given the branding on some HGVs I saw pictures of yesterday, I’d struggle to say that their journeys were unavoidable’. Images across news outlets and social media show jack-knifed wagons and stranded trucks blocking essential routes across the UK. Sturgeon’s words are unequivocal and backed by Unite Scotland who claim that DHL bosses in the Westfield depot at Cumbernauld, ignored police and Scottish Government travel warnings on Wednesday and sent five truck drivers out to deliver furniture goods and clothing (Unite Scotland). Let’s be clear, truck drivers are not being blamed and remain a means to an end for transport bosses. They drive the trucks and deliver the goods. Across Scotland the Met Office predicted ‘significant disruption to travel, including roads becoming blocked by snow and some communities becoming cut off’. Snow fall ranging from 5cm of snow could fall within an hour and lying snow could reach 20-30cm or possibly 40cm. Yet there is little doubt that some of the balding, pot-bellied ‘transport elite’ fuelled by nepotism and driven by profit did not even considered the effects of the fast approaching ‘beast’. They merely expected their averagely paid drivers to deliver the goods and be tucked up in bed ready for another silly-o-clock start. How did they think this was going to end? These same self-serving bosses will be counting the cost of recovery, the loss of vehicles and subsequent insurance claims for damage and lost loads. No lives lost. No fucks given. Big Dave rolled into the yard on Thursday, truck and trailer intact, and his benevolent boss sent him home. Nicola Sturgeon is right, to a point, trucks should not be sent out into the wild blue yonder to fend for themselves but she is overlooking one startling fact. Most of these wagons would have been out there anyway, hundreds of miles from home and with only their next destination to head to. There are just too many things that need to change to avoid the chaos we have witnessed repeating itself. Road haulage is unprepared and unwilling to compromise on age-old traditions that require the driver to press on regardless come hell or high water. Most hauliers live hand to mouth and don’t have the luxury of parking up and losing £500 a day, others simply don’t care. Truck drivers have fewer places to park up to see out the storm so even if they wanted too it was unlikely they could find somewhere to stop. Warehouses and RDCs employing just-in-time delivery schedules to retail essentials to the general public save on space and money by doing so. Yet two days of disruption and the local supermarket looks like a 1970s bakery in East Berlin. And last, and by that I also mean least, transport is so far down the list of priorities for all our beloved Governments that we should actually applaud Nicola Sturgeon for even mentioning it. Right now, for the hire and reward industry, any publicity is good publicity, right? |
AuthorAging proletariat with face, teeth and body to prove it. Archives
August 2021
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