Rather than hijack pdc's road widening thread something tangentially related as it could involve mamba road works.
Certain lorry manufacturers are lobbying the EU for an increase of the max vehicle weight to 60 tonnes gvw and increase the max length. I believe this is for a lorry and drawbar trailer outfit.
Their argument is that bigger loads will reduce number of lorries on the roads. They also argue that this vehicle size has been used without problems in Sweden and Finland for years, so you can make a good guess which VM's I'm talking about.
Now forgive me if I have got this wrong but I thought that there was good information that the last hike in max gvw's did not result in that many fewer vehicles. Recall a survey about average vehicle loads showed most running part full / empty depends on your viewpoint. Of course changes in the rules did allow the greater use on US style trucks instead of the cab overs predominant in Europe and UK.
IIRC the most significant effect was the horrendous congestion and cost of uprating hundreds, maybe thousands of bridges now incapable of taking the heavier loads.
So Backroomers, should the VM's get their way with the EU and get an increase in max gvw?
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Is a small lorry under the HGV limit still exempt from having a speed governor when towing a drawbar trailer. The other week I saw a car transporter with three cars on board towing a trailer with four more cars at about 70mph. An HGV transporter for seven cars would have been restricted to 56mmph.
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Alan
Assuming this was a motorway then he was still illegal regardless of weight age etc.
60 is the max when articulated or towing a trailer.
see the little + after the 70 on the linked page of the Highway code.
hope that helps,
FiF
www.highwaycode.gov.uk/09.shtml#103
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I would have thought larger rather than heavier lorries could possibly cut down on the amount of lorries on the roads. I work in logistics, and while most of the 200 or so lorries my warehouse deals with in a day will be physically full, none of them get anywhere near the max vehicle weight. It's simply not something we consider. While this may be a wild assumption, I reckon that most lorries on the road do not approach their maximum weight limit, but may be physically full. From my (limited) experience and point of view, larger lorries rather than those with a higher maximum weight would be more useful and could possibly improve efficiency. I'm not saying that we should allow larger lorries, simply that size not weight seems to be the limiting factor to me.
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SJK may well in his warehouse only see artics with loads of 7/8tonnes which fill the capacity of a 12m semi trailer but the real story is revealed out at the occasional spot checks mounted by DOT which show a large proportion of those stopped are well overweight, in some cases by horrendous percentages of the permitted GTW. Look at the deep ruts in the inside lanes of M1/M2,any road away from the ferry ports. One incident sticks in the mind was the Spanish wagon checked at Dover which required three trailers to convey the 46tonne overweight of potatoes (46 over the permitted weight of 18.5tonne for the load Manuel should have been carrying!!!
Happy Motoring Phil I
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No No No!!! The argument about larger goods vehicles resulting in fewer such vehicles on the roads is utterly specious. The real reason is that the larger the vehicle the lower the unit costs of transporting its payload. This is just another attempt by the already-too-powerful road transport lobby to get legislation passed which satisfies its own ends.
The use of larger goods vehicles on our roads would, I believe, have horrendous maintenance implications (not to mention congestion). We can't maintain the roads we have to an acceptable standard as it is; the last thing we need is further damage caused by heavier lorries. They may well have been used in Scandinavia without problems, but I suspect they are far better at maintaining their road network than we are here. (Maybe they use a higher proportion of motoring tax revenues on actually maintaining roads - interesting concept ;-))
IMO we desperately need more freight on the railways, and anything that tips the economic balance even further in favour of road freight gets a thumbs down from me
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