In this week’s episode, David shares his views about hauliers. Or, to be more specific, people who drive those bloody big lorries that pollute the environment with their foul stench and noxious fumes.
As ever, you can be sure that our man doesn’t hold back and we can only hope that members of the Eddie Stobart fanclub (yes, there is one) have a sense of humour.
Check out the show to check out why and, as ever, do subscribe to the show over at iTunes.
Well i am a big fan of yours David but i`m sad to say i have to disagree with you on this one (well part of it anyway) i do agree with the fact of the enviromental issues of them,but on the side of them protesting about the price of fuel i agree with its not just them that have to pay that price its everyday people like me. I`ve heard the oil is the lowest its been in years yet the price of fuel is increasing,i know they say use public transport but to me buses are just as un-enviromentally friendly as hauliers. Have you ever been stuck behind a bus? the fumes and **** that can come off them is horrible.(just my opinion though) xx
What should we do instead? Fly everything everywhere?
David you speak the sense sir.
Hauliers are indeed the scum of the Earth.
You failed to mention also that the drivers are the most dull and boring people that ever lived.
“What should we do instead? Fly everything everywhere?”
No. Use trains; like most every other developed nation on the planet.
Poor David… surely you must’ve known you were gonna get a lashing for this one. You must get rather weary of sticking your neck out knowing what kind of reception you’re likely to get?!
Yet you do it anyway. I truly admire you for that.
Not sure whether it’s a sign of profound courage, or complete mania… or possibly you just can’t help yourself? Whatever your motive, I’m glad you do it.
You’re a jolly good fellow Mr. Mitchell. 
I agree wholeheartedly with you. Money should be put into updating and modernizing the rail systems in the UK and US instead of shipping my millions of trucks. Railways are far more cheaper and efficient than trucks. Kudos to you.
Apparently hauliers are the last taboo. People are ten times more worked up about this than they were about the corpse f*ckers last week.
Shame about the rail systems.
You are one tough monkey, David.
Hear, bloody hear, David.
Get the bloody trucks off the road during congested times of the day - it’s simple. Bad trucks form the road from 7am - 10am and 4pm - 7pm. Better still, ban them all day, so that the slower traffic (which is what they are) are using the roads when it’s much quieter.
Bingo, overnight we’ve solved 90% of congestion problems for the next ten years, which might give us time for the massively expanded haulier industry to shrink back to a reasonable size, and for us to improve our dilapidated road network.
Have you sat on the M6 lately? It’s 2 lanes of trucks and 1 lane of cars, all crawling along at 30mph if you’re lucky. Toll roads and higher taxes are not the answer. Making better use of the road network 24 hours a day is.
And where do all these trucks go to during the night? They don’t just drive around the motorway system. They head into towns, cities and villages making deliveries.
Yes, it would ease traffic congestion during the day but while you’re sleeping you’ll have the distant thunder of an artic passing by delivering its goods.
And how many people would need to work nights to offload all the goods? Perhaps you’re offering Name (required)?
Nice closing simile.
To those who think David is wrong, perhaps they could suggest where his error lies without ignoring the fact that it’s perfectly possible for a system to be hopelessly inefficient and riddled with inadequacies while still having to rely on it.
Just because we happen to be stuck with a system doesn’t make it automatically safe from perfectly well justified (and amusing) criticism.
See also The NHS, Public Education, Representative Democracy, The Monarchy, The Stock Markets, Foreign Policy, Nuclear Escalation…
Thanks for this, David! I live in North America where cargo trucks fairly much rule the highway, and they’re ridiculously full of them, to an extent not balanced with their actual contributions to making the roads a better place.
Cargo trucks, at least over here, are one of the biggest causes of fatal roadside accidents in this neck of the woods, because all make a habit of breaking the speeding limits by at least thirty kilometers an hour, they frequently run red lights (which in the last year resulted in six deaths in my immediate neighbourhood, four of them kids under twenty years of age), and are only rarely gracious enough to check the rear view mirror before changing lanes, forcing cars in the other lane to put the brake violently lest they want their car to taste a bit of truck even more violently.
When they’re not being outright menaces they’re obnoxious, either sticking to the tail end of your car as though there’s an industrial strength magnet at the back of it, because god knows, who needs a safety distance when you’ve got a vehicle that brakes slowly, carries a lot of momentum and weighs god knows how many tons?, or by driving in the fast lane so slowly joggers by the side of the road pass them by with ease. Because oh no, none of us have anywhere important to go, like, say, WORK or something.
Love you, love you, love you for doing this soapbox. Can’t wait for the next!
If there were no lorries, hitchhikers would never get a lift anywhere, and what would happen to all those greasy burger retailers in laybys?
There should be more areas on A roads where lorries can’t overtake, cos that is annoying.
And if more things were produced locally they wouldn’t need to be shipped so far.
I’m a (recently ex) trucker, and agree broadly with what David has to say. However, until the government has the nuts and the cash to buy the land required through compulsory purchase orders in order to build the vast rail hubs at the sea ports, national sub-hubs for the containers to be shuttled to for regional distribution, and then city or county hubs for the final leg (which WILL have to be by road to the manufacturers, processors, retailers etc) then it’s never going to happen. It’ll need vast areas set aside for new lines to be put in to existing multi-million-pound trading estates for their goods to come in.
And then they won’t be able to account for the just-in-time nature of the large grocery stores/ supermarkets who receive their computerised orders from the stored, have them picked and dispatched in short order. The nature of rail won’t accommodate that kind of responsiveness to such a local level - so supermarket trucks will still be here there and everywhere. And of course those going to and from hubs so towns will still be congested.
So I’m all for the idea, but sadly it’s unworkable without a multi-trillion-pound revolution and vast building projects that would take decades, leaving short term solutions still to be accommodated.
What I WILL disagree with, from the other comments, is the idea that trucks should only move at night. You really haven’t a clue.
First things first - I’m sure you realise that night drivers on permanent nights command significantly more money than day drivers. Making the entire workforce work nights only will put a huge cost burden on the end consumer.
Then you need to factor in that the only places that tend to TAKE night-time deliveries are supermarkets, distribution hubs, and major industries (steel works etc) - and then at reduced capacity for many of them.
So you’ll need an entirely new bunch of employees at stores, distribution hubs etc to receive these deliveries. That’s hundreds of thousands of jobs shifted from days to nights. Those who don’t quit because of family commitments will need paying more.
Oh, and we forgot about all the manufacturers and suppliers who have to load trucks up too, to go off for distribution - pretty much any company who makes something in large enough quantities that a transit van can’t manage to serve their needs (a couple of pallets a day then, which isn’t much) will need staff to load them up. And proper day-shift style security - johnny-robber doesn’t stop at night, and more buildings open at night is prime time for the naughty little minxes!
Next, given the sudden massive increase in lorries queueing to deliver to city centre stores in their allowable night-time window of opportunity, you’re going to have trucks with their night heaters running or even main engines in winter to keep the driver warm. Idling engines going nowhere will churn out even more pollution, not to mention the noise right outside peoples upper floor apartment windows whilst they try to sleep.
Furthermore, legislation exists with regards to night driving that caps the hours that can be worked and driven at levels far below those of day drivers. This is for the obvious needs of the health, well-being, sanity, and general safety of them and other road users. Working so many nights you never see daylight for 6 months of the year is not healthy, and frankly crap for anyone with a family or any form of relationships in general. So you need lots more drivers but the key thing, lots more trucks to put the drivers in to take their loads places - where a daytime driver can do 3 drops in their allowed time, a night driver might only get to squeeze 2 in.
Then how about supermarkets, and in particular suburban ones, and “mini-markets”. Most small ones take a few deliveries a day, and biggish ones have a couple of loading bays with at least one occupied at any given time 24/7. You force all that stuff to arrive in an 8-10 hour window, the capacity doesn’t exist to handle it. Then of course those suburban stores having refrigerated trailers turning up, queueing to take their turn - the noise would make life unbearable for the very residents they serve.
And then, how often do you drive at night? I don’t mean 10pm when the late workers are coming home, or night workers going to work… I mean 2, 3, 4 in the morning. Jams do occur then too you know. The roads aren’t entirely abandoned. And you know why the jams occur in the night? Because the maintenance happens at night, and capacity is reduced. After all, they do it in the daytime and everyone complains. Accidents happen at night too. They still make a mess when it’s dark as well as in the daytime, and people get stuck for hours on end regularly. It’s the way of life.
Which brings us on to the people in public services who will need to be employed to cover the problems caused by tens of thousands of people being forced to work in the dark. Injuries from not seeing things or not being seen by others. Accidents from what is a simple numbers game, shifting from the daytime to night-time. You’ll need extra cover for fire brigades who will be cutting more people out of wrecked vehicles by torchlight when they’re normally more likely to be putting out fires. More police officers to police the roads and to assist clearing up the mess. More paramedics, doctors and nurses on night shifts.
And then the businesses and services used by people who normally work in the daytimes. Driver can no longer call his agency in his lunch break to discuss a pay problem, or the tax office to discuss his self assessment issues. He needs to book an appointment to see his doctor on the next day off he has, who will be sat there to answer the calls at night.
And of course with such numbers of people in haulage, supply chain as a whole, and in services now working nights to accommodate this whole new regime required just to move goods around the country, you’ve got hundreds of thousands of people getting inadequate sleep due to the simple facts that life goes on in the daytime. Kids playing outside, authority workers with strimmers mowing the grass, taxi drivers honking their horns, students playing music, people just generally living life, making trying to sleep when it’s light outside even harder than it is. It’s just something people put up with now, or in fact some people prefer things that way round. But effectively forcing hundreds of thousands more to do it or else not have a job any more will simply annoy them. A lot. <— Understatement… It just won’t work.
Of course if the rail network and public transport could shuffle the millions of people who need to move around the country every day, who instead sit alone in their 15′ long aluminium cages, churning away with air conditioning in a queue in the midlands for 3 hours, driving so badly, causing wave-effect jams with inconsiderate driving that doesn’t accommodate the fact that trucks are heavy things that are hard to slow down and harder to speed up when fully laden, the argument wouldn’t be happening.
So, David’s rant, good, enjoyable, and interesting in principle - “Name Required”’s anonymous rant because they find the realities of life a little inconvenient, SO wrong it can spawn literally a thousand words in response about HOW wrong they are in so very many ways (and from a thicko knuckle-dragging dull-as-f*ck trucker who is clearly addled from years of having to listen to Radio 2 in traffic jams, masturbating rabidly through his steering wheel to the sound of Sally Traffic, whilst dreaming of murdering hitch-hikers and prostitutes, lobbing cola bottles full of wee into hedgerows, and shaking angry fists at anyone within a 50 yard radius). Think a little before regurgitating your words in a manner that would sit neatly on a red-top’s letters page.
Ask yourself: “Would my idea work, or am I just being an arse, mashing my paw on the keyboard as fast as possible, before the froth coming from my mouth hits it first”.
Now please excuse me, the corpses rolled up in the carpets in back are beginning to smell a little. I need to febreeze the maggots.
Mr Mitchell - Keep up the good work!
Or you could simply condense that down to what Julian said. It’ll save you some time reading it.
Well said Paul
The world needs better and cheaper public transport and broad bicycle lanes on both sides of every road!
I would like to see the motorised polluters going the extra mile in stead of bicyclists and pedestrians allways being rewarded for their green awareness by having to use more curvy, longer, badly paved roads.
It just goes to show, you can’t be too careful!
I thought Helen made an excellent, little noticed point:
“And if more things were produced locally they wouldn’t need to be shipped so far.”
We could all drastically reduce the need for haulage if we stopped thinking we need most of the crap that’s shipped around the world. Obviously grocery stores are, to some extent, an exception, but many goods can either be produced relatively locally or gotten along without.
David Mitchell for King!
First of all, it’s interesting how this video has stirred up such responses (nice one Paul).
I think that the crux of the problem that the UK has is an extremely poor infrastructure system. This is mainly because of the fact that it has grown up over a long period of time, and never had someone sitting down with a pencil and a blank sheet of paper designing it.
In this, it can be said that the system is not designed to cope with modern transport levels. In reality, short term solutions such as building a new bridge here, and a congestion charge there, is not going to work.
The UK needs a long term solution to its communication network problems.
I think that lessons can be learnt from these ‘new-world’ countries, like Australia, where I am currently based.
I believe that someone needs to sit down with a pencil, ruler, and a big map of the UK and just start again. Having a ‘motorway’ in the middle of nowhere, and have it abruptly stop and turn into a small B-Road is bad idea. Having a rail ‘network’ that is based on an old Victorian system, and being privatised, is a bad idea. Closing one’s mind to having a sustainable infrastructure is a BAD IDEA.
When pommies start taking their infrastructure system seriously, and start investing for the future in it, all of these problems, arguments and flag-waving between different road users will disappear.
Nice work, David, that took guts.
“No. Use trains; like most every other developed nation on the planet.”
Every other nation has trains that run properly. We’d never see our goods again.
i’m a boring geek: the damage done to a road surface is proportional to the axle load raised to the power 4.
roughly, a 50 tonne lorry does 10,000 more damage to a road than a 2 tonne car.
a 2 tonne car does 160,000 more damage than a bicyle.
D. Mitchell has a point; lorry road tax would need to be 10,000 times more than car road tax to make it fair. Or, about a million quid per lorry, per year.
or, to put it another way, each articulated lorry you see represents about a million quid of tax payers subsidy every year. every, single, lorry.
still happy with that? or shall we put some of that load on the railways?
(and bicycle road tax would be around 0.06pence.)
I love the way you’re all directing these comments to David Mitchell, do you seriously think he reads them? 99% of these comments are utterly retarded, you have misunderstood what he said.
without trucks you get nothing. 60 percent of townships have no railway network. How do you get things to villages or the countryside? I see the problems with environment clearly enough but an overloaded rail network would clog up roads with commuters in the same way as an overloaded road network might force people to the rail. youll notice though that economically the road system is cheaper and more efficacious to utilize. Surely car drivers are to blame for wasting fuel carrying basically no weight at all. when they could be on public transport or the rail network. then you wouldnt have to worry about the motorways being blocked by trucks. Thats what they were designed for after all. Transporting goods, not people. Maybe you could try more imaginative ways to get around. Or you could just build a d
ecent railway network for us at a competetive price and solve the problem yourself? no…then do more research before you bitch.
You David are an idiot.
How exactly did the shirt on your back get to the shop you bought it from or get delivered to your door via t’internet?
By a donkey and cart, I don’t think so. Even if it did i’m sure a lilly livered liberal such as yourself would complain about that too. Cruelty and all that.
Ever eaten food David? How do you think that got to your plate? By fairies flying it on a carpet powered by pixie dust?
“Don’t pay for the damage they do”? Hello, they pay road tax David. That is what it is allegedly for.
“Fuel duty…is environmentally good news”? I suggest you do a little more research before coming out with such a mealy mouthed statement into how much actually goes towards “environmental” causes, I think you will find it is well below 10%.
If any system is “antiquated” then it is the railways which are a Victorian relic and should be consigned to the dustbin of history along with typhoid and ricketts.
If however your complaint about hauliers is the way they try to race each other and occupy both lanes of a dual carriageway or reduce a motorway to one lane when you know, I know, they know, and indeed everyone in the world knows they are all limited to 100km/h and is as pointless an exercise and pathetic show of male bravado as a arm wrestling competition or seeing how quick one could down a pint then I could see your point.