Carryfast:
Road transport operators don’t need to pay for the entire costs of the road network only their share of it.Of which VED more than covers bearing in mind that VED more than covers road expenditure as it stands having been diverted from road budgets to other requirements.
As I say, there is a bait and switch here. I’m willing to believe operators pay for the tarmac wear and nothing more.
I’m not willing to believe they pay for everything about the road network which they depend on (including the constant incremental additions to the infrastructure to enable 100% access to new premises, the expense of building it at a scale suitable for large vehicles, the repair and inspection regimes, the training costs, the policing costs, and so on), except perhaps partly through the range of taxes that they currently pay (and should therefore continue to pay).
The railways do not need to be taxed in the same way, because it is more financially integrated and there is less potential for free riding, so to speak.
Yes we know that trains can win out in terms of productivety regarding bulk products going to the same destination served by rail terminals at each end of the journey.But they aren’t much good when it comes to shifting numerous different ( truck sized ) loads to numerous different widespread destinations away from rail terminals.The definition of ( truck sized ) being open to variables and question.With the bigger that definition then the more advantageous road transport and the less rail transport’s advantages become.On that note we’ve seen numerous attempts by the rail lobby to artificially limit ( sabotage ) road transport’s efficiency in that regard historically in a blatant attempt to protect rail interests.
I don’t know what sabotage you’re specifically referring to, but I imagine the rail industry has a perfectly fair case for saying that the supposed efficiencies of road transport should not even be visited by our minds until there is an equalisation of wages and conditions. It might be the case that, once this has occurred, rail is the indisputable winner.
Road transport operators who promote competition with rail are not doing so out of any high-minded judgment about the suitability of each. They would happily replace the railways with horse-drawn carriages, if they could amass a slave army to run it for peanuts.
On that note truck driver’s wages can obviously be improved massively than they are now given the extra productivety ( and extra skills demanded ) provided by the use of LHV’s and the cost savings provided by the use of red diesel.In which case what is the rail sector so afraid of in that regard.
I don’t agree. The increased productivity (or reduced taxation) might go straight to customers as reduced prices, or operators as increased profits, not to workers as increased wages. That is the story of the British economy over the past 40 years - productivity has increased massively, and wages have not.
Your problem is that you start by assuming that operators are collectively under some sort of constraint in paying low wages, which they would gladly increase if they could. The only constraint they are under is in competition with each other, and charging customers too little (who could easily pay more), because labour is not sufficiently organised to enforce a higher price.
As for treating truck drivers as second class workers.That’s exactly what such unjustified sabotaging of the road transport industry,to create a rigged playing field which favours rail freight workers,is doing.While it’s equally obvious that standing together against the employers ain’t going to work.Until ‘that’ problem has been sorted out first and which the employers ‘and’ drivers 'should be expected to be on the same side.
The interests of the working class are not sabotaged by protecting high-pay, high-productivity industries from undercutting by low-pay, low-productivity industries.
It is not obvious to me that employers and drivers should ever be on the same side in fighting the employers and workers in an adjacent division of the same industry, because all the employers on each side will do is play off the workers on each side against each other.
Road haulage employers will tell drivers that there’s no room for wages to stay high or else they’ll lose work to rail, and rail freight employers will say the same vice versa, so that the workers on both sides get locked into undercutting each other until their wages have reached the bottom.
) can see the problem, but the Haulage Industry can’t or more likely won’t see it as any solution will cost them money.
The problem being that those like Rjan apply double standards in that regard which keeps truck drivers as second class workers.