DfT’s freight statistics are a muddle – but road is king

Our investigations have revealed a muddle in the DfT’s road freight statistics.

We recently asked the DfT’s freight statistics team to provide the goods vehicle-km and tonne-km by axle type so that we could calculate the average load per vehicle. Multiplying those values by the vehicle-km on the strategic road network, available from the DfT’s road statistics, would provide an estimate of the tonne-km on that network.

Unfortunately, the vehicle-km on all roads from freight stats totalled 18.8bn whereas the value from road stats was 26.3bn – 40% more than the freight stats number!

The inconsistencies at the vehicle class level were even more marked, casting doubt on both sets of data. The DfT has been investigating the discrepancy for some months but has provided no explanation to us to date. 

In a recent issue, Philippa Edmunds of pressure group Freight on Rail (Letters LTT 09 Nov) extols the growth in rail freight referring particularly to consumer goods and containers. However, Transport Statistics Great Britain’s (TSGB) Table 0401 reports 19bn tonne-km by rail in 2001, 22bn in 2005/06, but only 19bn in 2010/11, implying no growth in rail freight as a whole. Furthermore, supposing the numbers can be believed, rail freight in 2010/11 was a smaller proportion of the road plus rail total than it was in 2005/06.

The same table of TSGB provides, for 2010/11, 151bn tonne-km by road, the 19bn by rail referred to above, 42bn by water, and 10bn by pipe (where the latter is the previous year’s value). The road freight omits international freight. Ignoring this omission, and supposing the road freight data can be relied upon, that suggests 68% of freight by road, 8.5% by rail, 19% by water and 4.5% by pipe, or, if water and pipe are ignored, 88.8% by road and 11.2% by rail.

If road freight should be increased by 40% then rail’s share of total falls to 9%. 

Now, if freight tonne-km are proportional to goods vehicle-km then 64.5% of road freight was on the strategic road network in 2010. That network has a lane length of circa 50,000km. Dividing the tonne-km by lane length and by the days in the year provides an average daily flow per lane of 5,340 tonnes. The corresponding value for rail per track is 1,680 tonnes, three times less than achieved by the competing and comparable road network.

The numbers illustrate that, despite serving the hearts of our towns and cities, rail makes a trivial contribution to the nation’s freight movement and the productivity of rail, compared with that achieved by the strategic road network, is astonishingly low.

Discuss this at LTT's UK Rail & Freight Conference on the 22 Jan 2013