Ministry analyses regional goods transport
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THE North-West and the South-East of England accounted for nearly 30 per cent of the total tonnage of all goods moved by road in Great Britain, says the last of the series of Ministry of Transport reports on the 1962 Road Goods Transport Survey.
The report, published this week as a Statistical Paper, analyses the flow of goods between planning regions and also within each region. Commodities carried by road transport are detailed, together with the number of journeys, length of haul, etc.
Inter-regional comparisons of the annual tonnage ' of road goods generated per head of the population and per employee show that, although differences between most of the regions are small, the South-Eastern and Southern regions are markedly below the rest of the country. The report suggests that one reason for this is the high population densities over much of this part of the country; economies of scale in transport are probably more common in this area than in any other.
Another reason is that London and the SouthEast is exceptional in that a high proportion of the population is engaged in administrative, professional and other services; and that it has no major heavy industry so that its products tend to be light in terms of tonnage.
Statistical Paper No. 6, "Survey of Road Goods Transport, 1962; Final Results: Geographical Analysis" is available from HMSO (Price 9s. 6d.).
(Part I of the 1962 Survey of Road Goods Transport, published in 1964, gave detailed information about the goods vehicle fleet, its size, age, structure and carrying capacity, together with estimates of the total work done by road transport (HMSO, price 5s.). Part 11 of the Survey, also published in 1964, gave an analysis of the commodities carried by inland freight transport in this country, and how their carriage is divided between the various forms of transport (HMSO, price 7s.). Part III, published in 1966, was a technical report on the methods employed in the Survey (HMSO, price 6s. 6d.).)