The Relationship between Freight Transport Organization and Industrial Linkage in Britain

Abstract

It is argued that studies of industrial linkages have given inadequate attention to the role of the transport industry in maintaining them. By focusing on the functional relationship between plants in the overall cycle of production, the importance of transport reliability and other qualities of service factors is emphasized. A census of industrial traffic in the north-west Midlands provides data to show how manufacturers' preferences for various modes of transport, based more on service quality than on cost, have spatial implications. A paradox appears in that the more valuable goods, which theoretically travel most widely, demand the transport qualities associated with private transport, which has a generally restricted field of movement. It is shown, however, that under conditions which allow for efficient utilization of vehicle capacity, private vehicles can maintain linkages over long distances competitively with professional transport. The regular flow of components to large engineering factories is one such case. It is difficult to prove that the structure of the transport industry in itself directly influences the distribution of industry, or to define the spatial limits of viable daily journeys, but it is nevertheless clear that regulations such as those governing drivers' hours have important, if latent, spatial implications. STUDIES of industrial linkage tend to give little explicit attention to the transport industry, which is surprising in view of the correspondence between inter-plant commercial transactions and movement of the relevant goods. This neglect no doubt reflects the much reduced prominence of transport costs as an explanatory variable in the contemporary analysis of manufacturing location, a development clearly justified by the evidence. Census of Production data witness to the comparatively minor role of transport costs in this sector (5-8 per cent of net output in I963: see S. L. Edwards, 1970), and the findings of a major survey of industrial linkages in north-west London provide confirmatory evidence, in that the cost of movement of goods is apparently little deterrent to interaction on a regional and national scale (D. E. Keeble, I969). If, then, transport costs have become a poor diagnostic of the spatial structure of industrial linkages, what is to be gained by returning to an obsolescent theme ? The contention of this paper is that concentration on transport costs has led to an unwarranted neglect of other characteristics of the transport industry which are demonstrably significant to manufacturers, and which are potential sources of spatial variation in linkage patterns. To focus the research problem it is first necessary to clarify the salient characteristics of linkages and the industrial use of transport. THE NATURE OF INDUSTRIAL LINKAGE There is an unhelpful variety of definitions of linkage current in the literature, stemming largely from differences in the scale of study. For present purposes the term is confined to micro-level analysis, where decisions relating to production are translated into material linkages as functional transactions between two specific establishments involving specific goods. Only by accepting this disaggregated definition can one begin to unravel the complex cross-flows of manufactured goods so characteristic of advanced economies (cf. the typology of P. A. Wood, I969). It is this feature