New TfL's HGV's can't see you for s*** poster

A van (ford transit) can typically take a payload of just over 1 tonne. An articulated lorry can take up to if not over 40 tonnes. That would mean 40 vans, 40 drivers and 40 engines to fuel and then pollute. 1 lorry is much more efficient.

Not to mention that van drivers might not be 40 times less likely to kill you than HGV drivers, although your numbers are a bit wrong. HGV gross vehicle weight (gross train weight for artics/drawbars etc.) is up to 44 tonne, but payload is a lot less than that, around 30 tonnes for an ideally specced urban vehicle, while payload on a typical MWB Transit used by courier companies is up to 1.6 tonne. Transits do about 5 times the distance per fuel burned, so the pollution increases by a factor of about 4 if you switch all freight from 44 tonne articulated lorries onto 20 Transits, and the labour cost goes up a little over 10-fold given that HGV drivers command significantly higher hourly pay than van drivers.

All of which is of course a diversion, since there is no practical small-vehicle substitute for the identified hazard, the 3 and 4 axle rigid construction vehicles. If you want Crossrail, for instance, you have to live with the huge number of tipper truck movements needed to take away the tunnelling spoil and deliver the concrete, and the city centre movements don't change even if you go intermodal at a rail head or barge dock. A compromise which adds substantial, but not crippling, labour cost to these movements would be mandatory co-pilots. They're not allowed to move around construction sites without a banksman, so it seems odd to allow them to move around congested city streets, among co-users who have not had the same safety training as site workers, without similar assistance.