London Crossrail bans unsafe lorries from its sites

Chapeau to Crossrail. Is the tide turning at last? Where London leads will the rest of the UK follow?

Well done Crossrail folk

Now all you folks working in construction procurement, logistics and and supply chain industries can make a real positive impact by including cycle friendly initiatives like this into your nest contract tender conditions and continuous improvement measures along with other socially and environmentally useful stuff your doing .

AV - Lowering the engine and gearbox of a construction truck would reduce the ground clearance. I go on a lot of construction sites and have driven across many, often in tipper trucks and on a few occasions I've been the one at the wheel. Reduced ground clearance would result in those trucks getting stuck.

hauling the muck out by train isn't a bad idea. The muckshifting operation is a major cost. But the lines into KX are very busy and disrupting them with freight trains would be an issue.

Good news, justs sense that the tide might be turning slowly

Tony - I have a photo of the situation one morning outside new laboratory site currently under construction adjacent to St Pancras. This is a relatively small scale project compared to Crossrail, but queuing up Midland and Pancras Roads are at least 30 x 8 wheeler (30+ton) tipper trucks, waiting to collect spoil from the site. The reason for this huge and costly fleet to shift the spoil, became apparent whan I found I was passing one every 150-200 metres stuck in the traffic on City Road, heading for the tipping site.

Crossrail has just started digging out the station box at Paddington - the hole will be around 100 metres deep, and 200 metres long, and about 30 metres wide. It will generate a mighty large volume of spoil, weighing roughly 2 tons per cubic metre. To this we add 50Km of tunnelling at 30+ sq m cross sectional area. That works out as a mighty big tonnage on its own. The Crossrail spoil will go downriver and build a small island as a wildlife enhancement but probably not quite enough for an airport:(.

The figure for failed lorries is 31 out of 253 according to Wednesday's Evening Standard - or 12.5%. However I feel very uneasy about blind reliance on remote and automatic safety devices. An oil industry colleague wryly noted that the BP rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico might have been nipped in the bud, had someone "looked outside" the control room door rather than relying on dials and gauges for every detail. detectors either break down or give false alerts for every lamp post as a possible cyclist. And then you have the typical wear & tear seen on construction plant.

Personally I'd note that there is plenty of space between the wheels of most construction site vehicles - and indeed most rigid trucks, where the engine and gearbox can be placed, and this would permit the driving position to be dropped to place truck drivers at the same level as all other road users and completely eliminate the blind spot without any reliance on contrived interventions like a galaxy of mirrors angled in all directions, and many with distorted images from their necessary convex shape.

A further solution which no single construction project could support, but one which would drastically reduce the risks posed by trucks travelling great distances through the City, the damage to the city's streets, and the cost to the contractors of thiose massive fleets of trucks required to keep the excavator supplied with an empty truck to fill-up exists in a number of strategically located 'disused' railways, and even existing sidings that could be used.

2 tunnels with space for 2 tracks and access from the sites around King's Cross, 2 stations with tunnels and track between Moorgate and Barbican etc. Trains with capacity to remove or deliver between 1000 and 2000 Tons can be parked up for loading or unloading during the day, and moved out when the peak hour passenger operations have subsided. It is in the City's interest to deliver such facilities if major construction is to go on and not deliver damage and danger, an in doing so reduce the cost of all construction projects in the City - Haulage of material in and out is a substantial 'cost' in a project, especially when we've been getting transport far too cheaply for far too long. Making the cost noticable and even greater for those who try to do things the wrong way, will get the industry's act cleaned up.

Good news - lots of technology around that works and will alert truck drivers to the presence of a cyclist and make it safer for anyone on two wheels.

now *that's* some action!