Giving green a lift

The project, which, for its first five years, is on the receiving end of almost £6 million of funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, together with a consortium of key freight operators and vehicle industry partners, is designed to ‘achieve very deep reductions in CO2 emissions from the road freight sector by combining highly-focused vehicle engineering with systematic improvements to freight distribution systems’.

In other words the project will look at means of combining the most effective and efficient vehicle engineering with the practical operation of the supply chain and smart logistics. 

The group will look at fuel efficiency through adoption of better driving techniques; payload maximisation by monitoring the use of load-space and capacity; empty running and the potential to carry goods for another party, saving their journey; carbon intensity of fuels – reducing emissions by using natural gas, biofuels and electricity; and modal split - moving goods by rail and water instead of road.

These are all admirable, and potentially extremely productive, means of improving supply chain performance, reducing carbon output and cutting costs. An efficient supply chain is not just good news for the environment and the consumer – but savings on the bottom line impact on the total performance of the economy, and that is in all of our interests.

But there are going to be some highly public issues that the CfSRF is going to have to wrestle with. 

Discussing vehicle weights and dimensions Professor David Cebon, director of the project, unashamedly said ‘Biggest is best’. His point was that the most efficient and economic movement of freight per tonne/kilometre is achieved by moving the maximum payloads on the longest and heaviest vehicles. This is a philosophy long since promoted by supporters of the case for the heavier and longer lorry. Sadly, it is an argument equally powerfully rejected by opponents of such a plan who seem to think that the expensive operation of lorries is just a whimsical fancy of their owners. 

Cebon also points out the flaws in some of the regulations which govern the way we control the movement of goods vehicles. For example, the fact that overnight lorry bans come off at six or seven o’clock in the morning at the almost exactly same moment as we take the kids to school or operate the rush hour to work! The consequence is road congestion and a substantial dilution of any benefits we have generated from advanced vehicle technology. This means that we need a new way of looking at how we manage these things from both national government and local authorities.