Round the Globe

By Nigel Parry

Your insider’s guide to news, shows and events around the globe

Round-up
With the current kerfuffle over road tolls in New Zealand, it is worth remembering that there are reasons other than funding for road charges. One of the principal candidates is combating the curse of congestion. After a slightly embarrassing false start a couple of years ago, the UK is warming to road charging again.

They may well have been keeping an eye on the London Congestion Charge, which has proved so successful in reducing the traditional central city snarl-ups (and pulling in a few quid into the bargain) that the zone has been extended. Not that the capital has an exclusive on congestion charging – there are currently eleven schemes around the country, and they may be a precursor to a national road pricing scheme.

Durham in the north of England has already had road pricing for six years – longer than London – and another five cities are looking to introduce it. There are many arguments being bandied about, from environmental to the need to get traffic (and business) moving. Indeed there are claims that the costs of being caught in congestion are higher than the charges levied to reduce it. Either way, millions of pounds have already been spent on feasibility studies.

The main complaint seems to be that, as if business wasn’t difficult enough at the moment, costs may go up as a result.

That doesn’t seem to have deterred US-based research company Freedonia, who have bravely predicted across-the-board steady growth in the market for materials handling equipment to 2012. Everywhere will be slowing down a bit, they claim, but still on the up. They are not the only ones being bullish. Analysts ARC came out with the prediction a few months ago that the global market for warehouse management systems (WMS) will surge ahead at 7.1 percent per year for the next five years. I wonder if they still hold to that.

Perhaps the trouble with predictions is that they don’t always take into account things which are unpredictable. While New Zealand has had to deal with storm-blown trees, floods, slips and even snow, spare a thought for time-pressed travellers and just-in-time logistics operations that use the Channel Tunnel. After a couple of days to put out the blaze caused by a chemical tanker, and some tidying up, the ‘Chunnel’ was carrying up to140 trains per day. While this figure may seem impressive, it is well below the normal 300 to 400, leading to some disappointed travellers and businesses around Europe.

It seems that some things are a little easier to predict, one of them being the likelihood of your truck being hijacked in South Africa – so much so that some shippers are bypassing the country all together. Apparently hijackings are up 40 percent to over 1200 a year. Now that’s what I call a growth industry. Perhaps they should be tracking their cargoes. Speaking of which, the BBC in the UK has just launched what it calls an ‘ambitious’ year-long project called The Box. Tracking a humble container around the world to hopefully illustrate the global economy, the container is specially painted and has GPS on board to pinpoint its location. You can even see where it has been on their website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/629/629/7600053.stm