There is no reason that trucks operated in city centres need a high cab, save that the truck operate at present has to pay a small premium for the low cab designs because they are not a mainstream product from the truck manufacturers - there are just 2 major suppliers in the UK Dennis-Eagle (Elite2) and Mercedes-Benz (Econic). I feel disappointed with my local Council, as they seem to still be buying high level cab refuse trucks, n the pretext that these are cheapest (ie 'best value') for their purchasing regime, but other Councils are taking this detail on board.
The change for London will not be overnight - the london Bus contracts took 5 years to see every London bus fitted with a core level of CCTV coverage, and the LEV zone has had to have a gradual implementation. So perhaps we can also see a 5-10 year plan to eliminate high cab, dangerously poor direct vision, trucks from London's streets, starting now.
To that we might ask that the brain power and capabilities now with TfL's restored Freight Unit are backed with support to deliver facilities to shorten the 60+ mile round trips made by the most damaging type of trucks on the road (DfT figures) which also present the most common type of truck killing cyclists, the 4-axle 32Ton rigid tipper/skip/concrete mixer with a payload of around 20 Tons. Big projects like the Francis Crick site (150 trips per day St Pancras to Rainham for around 2 months to remove excavated material should be moving material to rail (less than a mile) or river (less than 2 miles) where a couple of trains or 1500T on a couple of strings of barges per day would remove a huge amount of damage, pollution and and hazard from the city's roads. i've photographed up to 2500 Tons - equivalent to 125 32Ton trucks (and drivers) passing along the embankment with just 2 'drivers' and hardly noticed by those on the river banks. Daily around 10,000 Tons now moves around London by water, the issue can be tackled with radical and innovative thinking let's see it happen.
There is a wharf with 25T container loading gantry just alongside Cannon Street, and usually a 500T barge alongside - it can only be loaded at high tide as the berth is not piled and deepened for all states of the tide. Currently it is just used to load waste from the city, packed in to containers for loading on the barge. Up to 200T can be shipped from as far up as Battersea, I suspect that in times past the Gas Works at Brentford and the Docks (built by GWR) would have seen 2000T (or at least 2 x 1000T) barges reaching this far upstream. In Paris supermarkets get containers delivered on the Seine. The Regents Canal can manage about 80T per barge, and Kings Place used the canal for materials movement.
