Move is the height of nonsense

FREIGHT transport costs could soar by £300 million if the European Commission restricts the height of lorries, a respected Scottish academic warns today.

Professor Alan McKinnon, from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, studied the impact of an EC directive to standardise the sizes of lorries across the European Union.

Currently, most UK bridges can accommodate double-deck trailers up to 4.9 metres tall. But members of the haulage industry are worried that the EC wants to bring the height down to four metres, in line with the standard in a sizeable majority of the 27 member states.

McKinnon said standardising heights - effectively banning double-deckers - would increase articulated lorry traffic in the UK by 5.5 per cent and would raise CO2 emissions by the equivalent of 320,000 tonnes. That would be equivalent to putting an extra 151,000 cars on the road.

"These figures are significantly higher than anticipated and suggest that a gradual removal of double-deck lorries from Britain's roads could come at a high price in economic and environmental terms," warned McKinnon.

An EC spokesman welcomed the report. He added: "We have no formal proposals at the moment to standardise heights but we are actively looking at weights and sizes of trailers."