Keep on trucking

Road haulage is the transport of choice for the majority of goods distributed around the continent. But in the third of our exclusive articles, Wouter van Dieren, Dutch sustainability guru and chairman of the Institute for Environment and System Analysis (IMSA) in Amsterdam, says that our attitudes to road haulage need to change if we are ever to reduce road congestion and encourage more sustainable mobility.

Hire local
“What often strikes me as I travel around Europe, is the large number of trucks on the roads, criss-crossing the continent. It is a clear indication of our inability to regionalise the production and consumption of goods. We should be trying to reduce the transportation of goods from one part of the country – or continent – to another. Why not hire a local road mender, instead of the current practice where authorities are obliged to tender nationally or internationally, so the materials you need end up being trucked half way across the country before you even use them,” says van Dieren.

“There are far more efficient ways to transport goods than the current model,” he summarizes. “It’s not just about cleaner engines, but about reducing road transport altogether. The sector’s performance in terms of the environment and energy conservation could improve by a factor of ten. This isn’t a new idea. The Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, in Germany, calculated this ten years ago.”

Focus on price
Van Dieren believes that the current situation is the result of putting too much focus on price, with not enough – if any – consideration paid to environmental damage and congestion.

One option he supports is to introduce a levy on each kilometre driven, which would go some way to taking the environmental and congestion impacts of road haulage into account when overall costs are calculated.

Model
Van Dieren’s ideas are not just the pipe dreams of an idealist. He highlights Singapore as model for more sustainable national transport strategies. And he has a valid point. Singapore is the smallest country in South East Asia, with five million inhabitants crammed into 683 square kilometres. That’s 6,666.2 inhabitants per square kilometre, compared to 394.3 in the Netherlands.

“But there’s not a traffic jam in sight,” says van Dieren. “Public transport and the taxi system are organised so well, that you don’t need a car. Singapore uses market mechanisms to manage road capacity. We could do the same thing here, starting with the transport of goods.”

Pay-for-use
One of van Dieren’s ideas is to introduce a levy on empty trucks, using available technology to automatically detect if a truck is empty. Another idea is for every driver to be assigned a share of the space available on the road network each year. They can use that share themselves, or they can sell it.

“What matters is that we start paying for the space we use and the pollution we cause to the environment, air quality and living conditions, as we are starting to do now at a national and industry level with carbon emissions trading,” says van Dieren.