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Road Freight

Answer

The Chief Executive of Roads Service (Dr. Malcolm McKibbin has written to the hon. Lady in response to this question.Letter from Dr. Malcolm McKibbin, dated 16 October 2006:"We have consulted with officials in other Departments and elsewhere within the Department for Regional Development, but unfortunately the information that you requested is not held. Roads Service does however carry out a vehicle kilometres of travel (VKT) survey each year to estimate the total distance travelled by vehicles on Northern Ireland's road network. This provides a measure of the usage of the various roads and facilitates a direct comparison with the rest of the United Kingdom and other European Countries.""The following table lists the estimated total distance travelled by each of the five different categories of vehicle during the past three years."

Million
VKT	2003	2004	2005
Class 1 - Cars and Vans	15,970	16,751	16,916
Class 2 - Medium Commercial	1,061	1,002	992
Class 3 - Heavy Commercial	734	655	665
Class 4 - Articulated Commercial	423	385	392
Class 5 - Bus and Coach	60	60	58
Total	18,248	18,853	19,023

"With regard to estimating future road freight journeys no formal forecast exists. However within Roads Service we use transport models to develop traffic forecasts to enable us to assess the viability of proposed road schemes.""From the information we have available I can advise that our forecasts for the growth of all road traffic journeys indicates that the growth rate will fall to under 2 per cent. per annum by 2012."

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

93289; 450 c1010W;450 c1016W

Session

2005-06

Subjects

Freight Northern Ireland Roads

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk