StuartG said:
Come ride with me along the '40' route. You get compromised often when overtaking at a bus stop. You haven't got acceleration to clear it and if you brake to let it go this causes displeasure and fear of rear shunt by vehicles that could clear it. If you hold your position you are projected into the path of oncoming traffic. Also if the bus in on a curve it obscures all vision of you in its mirrors. It can pull out not know you are there. Finally the old trick of assessing when the bus will move by eyeballing the doors is much more difficult than a conventional bus.
To be honest, I would never dream of starting to overtake a long vehicle in the circumstances you describe. As I understand it, you've seen the bus pull over, you (presumably) know that buses don't remain stationary for long, you can't see the driver's mirror and you suspect the driver hasn't seen you, yet you still think an overtake is a sensible idea? I'm not having a dig at you here, but I'd have a long hard look at your own behaviour on the roads before worrying about the theoretical impact of a longer lorry.
Really? The point Denby was making is that they are street legal. That means anywhere that doesn't have specific restrictions if he can win his case. Ever seen a length restriction?
Yes, plenty. Usually, surprise surprise, on roads which are unsuitable for artics. If, as I suspect, this long lorry handles similarly to a standard artic as it appears to on the video, it won't be much more difficult to get around most town centres anyway, and no doubt if they are made road legal, there will be plenty of signs erected to tell the drivers where they can't go. After all, there are some bridges you can't get a 16' high trailer under, but no one lets that stop them being used on the road, do they?
But from what I've read about this, that's not what Denby has designed it for. He has plenty to lose in terms of bad publicity and recovery costs if the thing is spending half its working life stuck in town centres, after all.
The economic arguement is tosh. The reduction in carriage costs by this innovation would alter the distribution costs so fewer depots and longer routes. That is the kilometretonnes will increase. That is more freight on the road.
I don't think that's true. Consider my last place of employment ... every night I was one of five drivers trunking freight between Wolverhampton and Rochdale. The amount we were moving would not have increased if we'd each had one of these double lorries; we'd simply have been able to do it with two large trucks and a standard artic instead of five double decker trailers. Or the job I had before that one, which involved delivering mattress foam to a bed manufacturer. Each trailer was crammed full of this stuff, floor to roof and front to back, and we were running with perhaps five tons on the back. We used to do three or four of these a day. That number of journeys would be roughly halved if we'd been able to take twice as much on each trip. In neither case has the amount of freight being moved increased, you'll notice; it's simply being moved more efficiently. An awful lot of modern freight "cubes out" before it "weighs out".
- where you can read my views in more depth. But in short, I'd love a go in one of these, and from the look of the video link on the original BBC report, they don't appear to handle much differently, take up much more road space (apart from the extra length) or present much more danger to other road users than the things that are already out there.
) is about the most damaging possible, especially with non - steering axles. The continental "wagon and drag" (a standard rigid lorry with a trailer the same length behind it) is much easier on the road surface, especially if the trailer has a steering front axle. That Denby outfit looks to me more like a steering wagon and drag than anything else, albeit with two trailers instead of one. Whatever, it looks like it'll cause significantly less damage to the road surface than the thing I drive.