Let’s do away with these NIMBY zones

I’m a truck driver, and something my MP is going to be hearing from me about after the election, whoever they are, is the proliferation of so-called environmental weight limits or, as they’re often called among the driving community, “NIMBY limits” (it stands for Not In My Back Yard). These are weight limits, usually set at 7.5 tonnes which excludes all but the smallest vehicles that are recognised as trucks, intended to keep trucks out of residential areas, villages, small towns or other urban areas. Quite often they follow the construction of a bypass or other new road, and are intended to compel truck drivers to use the new road rather than jamming up the old roads through the town or village. This may seem quite reasonable, but many of them force truck drivers to use other residential roads, or slow and congested main roads, or to make circuitous detours when the direct route is only a few miles. With some of these ‘environmental’ limits, we have to ask: what do they mean by “the environment”?

To take a recent example: Buckinghamshire council recently imposed a truck ban on a whole tract of countryside south of Leighton Buzzard. After a new link road was opened up north of Dunstable, the local council there (Central Bedfordshire, which also administers the countryside between Luton and Bedford), imposed the same weight limit on roads through Dunstable, including the old A5 which was rerouted to meet the M1 north of Luton and Dunstable; a weight limit was also imposed on a stretch of the old A-road from Leighton Buzzard to Hemel Hempstead, quite appropriately as there is a bridge on that road which is narrow and has sharp bends at each end. The upshot is that anyone needing to make a journey from Leighton Buzzard to Berkhamsted, a journey of only 13 miles by the direct route, is expected to travel either via Aylesbury (resulting in a 24-mile journey) or Hemel Hempstead, resulting in a journey of nearly 28 miles running through a narrow and congested section of the M1 which runs straight through the suburbs of Luton and Dunstable. This detour is a quite unreasonable demand in an age when fuel prices are still high after the peak of 2022; it also results in greater carbon emissions.

Buckinghamshire council had conducted a consultation prior to introducing the “Ivinghoe Freight Zone”; however, it seems only to have been aimed at people living in the villages covered by it and some of those in the villages expected to take the displaced truck traffic, notably Wing, situated on the A418 road between Leighton Buzzard and Aylesbury. This was dismissed on the grounds that the road is already a strategic road. In essence, tough: their health and quality of life are to be sacrificed so that the people of Ivinghoe (where property prices are no doubt higher) can have a quieter life. I was quite unaware of any such consultation until I ran into it when trying to make this journey a few months ago. The consultation report does mention a response from the Road Haulage Association which neither supported nor opposed the scheme but did mention that it would require additional mileage, including to local businesses, which would have additional environmental impacts as well as financial ones, and displace HGV traffic into neighbouring villages rather than onto (non-existent) suitable roads. The council did not actually address these objections, however.

The report makes the usual cases for imposing the limits: that trucks cause noise, that there are properties which front the road and people complain of their houses shaking, and so on. In some cases, there are complaints of serious congestion and of trucks struggling to pass each other, but having travelled down some of the roads concerned, this is not a description of all the roads in that area and a brief look at Google’s Street View of the A418 through Wing shows that the issue of houses fronting the road is true there as well. There were also complaints of HGVs travelling at high speed through some of the villages; I think this is a dubious claim, as HGVs accelerate more slowly than cars and tend to travel more slowly (on average), especially if heavily laden or going uphill or if the road is narrow and they have to take extra care when passing other vehicles, especially other trucks. If anything, HGVs would slow traffic down and obstruct speeding cars, which would be a benefit for road safety. I don’t doubt that some of the trucks alleged to be driving at high speeds were actually there for legitimate purposes even under the new rules, accessing local businesses or providing local services.

While I do not object to EWLs per se, there should be more stringent guidelines for where and why they can be introduced: broadly, they should be used for stopping trucks using unsuitable roads where suitable alternatives exist that do not involve lengthy detours, and this should be set at five miles. Expecting truck drivers to use a perfectly good bypass instead of a narrow village road is quite reasonable; expecting them to take a ten-mile detour to avoid causing a bit of extra noise in one or two villages which do have suitable roads but whose residents would rather they didn’t go through their neighbourhood is not. If the aim is to get trucks out of residential areas, the alternative should not be through another residential area, and the fact that the latter already deals with heavy traffic congestion is not a reason to burden it with more. The mere fact of a bypass existing is not reason in itself to slap a weight limit on the old road, as people will generally use the bypass if it is available; rather, it should be imposed only if the old road is unsuitable or if there is significant vexatious use of it. There should also be a means to challenge such zones after they are imposed, or to appeal to an ombudsman outside the local council, as with planning decisions.

There is no human right to not have trucks passing by one’s house. Millions of houses the length and breadth of the country lie on roads which have large vehicles passing along them. Nobody has a better right to a quiet life than anyone else just because they live in a village rather than a town, or because their community lies along a B-road rather than an A-road, and nobody has a right to a quiet life at significant expense or inconvenience for others. There is more to the environment than noise levels in well-heeled small towns and villages; requiring vehicles grossing 18 tonnes or more to make circuitous detours through other villages and big towns to avoid one or two villages does not make environmental sense. For all these reasons we must have an end to these selfish schemes and an effective means to challenge them.

Image source: Jaggery, via Geograph. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) 2.0 licence. It is not suggested that the road depicted is part of a vexatious scheme such as described in the article.