No More Lethal Lorries - Petition

Got an email from Friends of the Earth this morning prompting me to write to my MP about this. So I did. Here's the link:

http://www.bettertransport.org.uk/take_action/longer-lorries-mps?product=TIP

And here's my letter:

The proposed legislation to allow an extra seven feet of space to be added to lorries appears to be entirely misguided.

There is currently no guarantee that this extra space would be filled. As it is, one in four lorries on our roads are empty and most others are nowhere near full capacity. Perhaps tightening up legislation around this area first would be wiser and more efficient before we rush to make them bigger?

And if we are going to modify lorries, lower cabs, larger windows, improved mirror positions and barriers designed to keep people from getting chewed up by the wheels would all be infinitely better places to start. Less polluting engines would be nicer too. These are things that will actually improve the life of every road user. And indeed anyone else who ventures outside their front door.

Sharing space on the road with a lorry can be nerve wracking when you’re in a car. It becomes even more frightening when you have nothing encasing you at all. Making HGVs bigger will only make their lumbering manoeuvres around London’s archaic horse-and-cart road system even more awkward and dangerous.

Fear of motor traffic is what keeps people off bicycles. But bicycles are actually the most practical way for most Londoners to traverse the city. How can we expect to see more people travelling short distances, which most journeys in the city are, on ecologically and economically efficient bicycles when our roads become less and less hospitable to human life? We’d be losing a healthier, happier, more mobile population and making it harder for people to get to and from their places of work, restaurants, cinemas and parks efficiently.

Longer lorries will mean even slower traffic in our city centres, greater damage to road surfaces, increased danger to all road users, especially the most vulnerable, and even if we choose to ignore all these very practical issues which affect us all, they will still make our roads a less pleasant place to live on account of noise, pollution and their general appearance. If this is law could guarantee a sizeable reduction of lorries, that might mean something, but as it stands this proposition is completely untenable for those of us who intend to enjoy living and working in less stressful, less polluted, safer and more pleasant surroundings. People will be more inclined to drive their cars, and as Noam Chomsky says, sitting in a Hummer in the middle of a traffic jam for hours of end is probably not the apex of human achievement.

Are we really willing to trade sizeable negative externalities, which affect all of us, in exchange for a policy whose economic impact is likely to be imperceptible? Isn’t that just incredibly short sighted, and worse, self destructive?