albion:
Carryfast:
It seems obvious that trying to create more parking to deal with ferry disruption and under capacity at Dover is all about trying to fix the symptoms not the cause.When the obvious conclusion is that people rightly prefer to use ferries than the tunnel.
While the Dover-Calais service and Channel Tunnel are being subjected to disproportionate demand regardless.
In which case the way to fix it is to reintroduce more alternative North Sea crossings especially development of more Hull based services to avoid traffic from/to the North unnecessarily using Dover.Together with the reintroduction of more alternative crossings from Dover to Belgium such as the old Zeebrugge and Ostende services.
The problem as it stands being the conflict of interest in the ferry operators wanting an under capacity situation.As opposed to those of us living in the South East not wanting our place turned into a bleedin great big truck park to deal with the results.
IIRC, the last really bad problem was a mixture of ferry problems and tunnel problems, primarily as a result of migrant activity. If people were loathe to use the tunnel then they wouldn’t have plans to increase the number of journeys per hour. If we are running Dover Calais, then we use the tunnel over a ferry every time. Yes, it’s more expensive but no desperately so and it’s faster - certainly the drivers prefer it to hanging around waiting for the next ferry, then spending a few hours bobbing on the waves.
It would probably be fair to say that the tunnel actually caused some of the situation in which ferry operators cut capacity thereby resulting in the present mess.As for preference there’s no way that you’d get me stuck in that hole in the ground I’m happy bobbing about on the waves thanks.
Which leaves the question how much more traffic would use the ferries if capacity was increased to previous levels.Also don’t remember all this aggro and plans to turn Kent into a truck park before the ferry operators cut those alternative routes.Nor can it make any sense to drive a truck between the North of England and Kent thereby using loads of unnecessary fuel and loading up of the South East road infrastructure requirement when ferry operations from/to Hull could be expanded.