The UK Department for Transport recently published a report on the feasibility of trialling longer and heavier vehicles (LHVs) in the UK. These would be double-trailer lorries up to 25.25 metres long with gross weights reaching 50 or 60 tonnes. The present government seems fairly sanguine about this relaxation of truck size and weight limits, unlike its predecessor in 2008.
Back then I was involved in a government-sponsored study, led by TRL, of whether LHVs should be allowed on British roads. Several months before our report was published, the Secretary of State for Transport declared that she would not be approving them – a rather premature remark from a department priding itself on ‘evidence-based decision-making’. I also got lampooned for my contribution to this research in an article in Private Eye entitled ‘Trucking Hell’. One needed a thick skin to get involved in the LHV debate.
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Over the past 15 years several developments have increased support for LHVs. For example, two influential reports by the International Transport Forum in 2010 and 2019 concluded that, in countries with adequate road infrastructure, LHVs can offer significant economic, environmental and safety benefits.
Other European countries, including the Netherlands, Denmark and Spain, have successfully legalised them, while Finland, with a long history of operating LHVs, recently extended its length and weight limits to 34.5 metres and 75 tonnes. As discussed in my February 2022 column, double-decking has enabled UK lorry operators to gain extra carrying capacity vertically, an opportunity denied their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. While this may constrain British demand for LHVs, it is still likely to be sizable.
There has, after all, been a strong uptake of licenses to participate in the UK trial of longer semi-trailers since 2012. Over the past decade, a pilot fleet of 2800 trailers up to 2 metres longer than standard have saved one in 12 journeys and 60,000 tonnes of CO2. A further extension of vehicle length, coupled with a weight increase, would yield proportionally greater savings.
Pressure to decarbonise road freight operations is more intense today than in 2008 and the consolidation of loads in ‘high capacity vehicles’ increasingly seen as a cost-effective carbon-reducing measure. It has been estimated that 25% of ‘demand-side’ CO2 reductions from UK road haulage could come from the use of LHVs by 2035.
Rail companies and lobbyists have long opposed the approval of LHVs, arguing that it would conflict with governments’ modal shift commitments. A UK commodity-level study, however, has concluded that LHV cost and CO2 savings would be ‘likely to outweigh possible effects of modal shift from rail to road’.
To allay fears that LHVs will stray onto inappropriate roads, network restrictions can be imposed and GPS-based monitoring used to ensure compliance. With the help of such an Intelligent Access Program Australian road authorities have been managing LHV traffic since 2008.
Convincing the public that bigger lorries are better may, nevertheless, prove challenging. A name change may help. We should call LHVs ‘high productivity vehicles’ or even adopt the European term ‘Eco-combi’.