That’s the warning from Brake, the road safety charity responsible for coordinating Road Safety Week.
Aggregate Industries’ plans for Straitgate Farm would put up to 200 HGV movements a day on Ottery’s busiest and fastest road - 44 tonne monsters loaded to the gunnels with sand and gravel turning right up a hill on a B road that’s less than 6m wide in places.
Each load would entail a 46 mile round trip for processing near Uffculme - some 2.5 million miles in all; enough reason alone - you would think - to reject this madcap application out of hand - on climate, air pollution and sustainability grounds alone.
All this together with a woefully deficient Transport Assessment, that contained no accident modelling or road safety projections, failed to take into account the 25% growth in Ottery’s housing, but did contain fictional traffic counts and who knows what else.
All this against the warning of other traffic consultants.
It’s shameful; a disaster waiting to happen.
And it looks like DCC is prepared to go along with it all; hook, line and sinker.
We’ve posted about HGV safety a few times before: the fact that 23% of accidents on B3180 involved HGVs in 2014; how AI truck comes off the road on Woodbury Common; that there’s More evidence today of why Ottery St Mary's B3174 Exeter Road is unsuitable for AI's 200-a-day HGV plans; how Safer Trucks have been designed, some of which are to be deployed in Cambridge but what’s AI doing to improve truck safety?; how AI’s HGVs never do anything wrong, do they?; how AI's haulage plans could cause the same road damage as 17 billion car movements; and how HGVs kill more pedestrians than cyclists.
We’ve all been aware of the stories in the press in recent times - detailing a multitude of HGV horrors. There’s no need to repeat them here.
Campaigners are calling for the number of HGVs on roads to be reduced. They have good reason to. New figures show that an HGV is seven times as likely to be involved in a fatal accident on a minor road than other traffic - double that of ten years ago:
Despite making up a small percentage of overall traffic, HGVs are involved in an unacceptably high number of fatal road traffic collisions and these figures show things are not improving. Whilst cars are getting safer, HGVs continue to be extremely dangerous in a collision. There are far too many large, heavy lorries on roads which are often totally unsuitable for them, as the high rate of crashes on minor roads shows.
And why are HGV crashes on the increase? Take a look at this article from 2015 reporting that "Quarry firms and heavy hauliers are blaming politicians and public policy makers for an apparent rise in crashes involving heavy goods vehicles":
Last week a four-year-old girl and three adults were killed in Bath when an 18-year-old driver lost control of a 32-tonne tipper truck. Until recently, the minimum age for driving this size of truck was 21 and insurance restrictions and safety concerns normally meant that few drivers younger than 24 were actually allowed behind the wheel. However, there has been a mass exodus of experienced drivers from the industry and transport managers are forced to use less experienced, foreign and agency drivers to keep vehicles on the road.
It is estimated that more than 20,000 lorry drivers changed jobs or retired rather than sit their CPC, compounding the shortage of experienced HGV drivers.
But whatever the reasons for the increasing number of HGV crashes, DCC could never pretend they weren’t warned of the dangers of AI's application; by countless local respondents, highways consultants - and this blog too.
And blogs can bite councils; the Grenfell Tower tragedy being a recent example.
