The following letter was received by A.S. from Amanda John at the Department
for Transport following an enquiry about what proportion of sideswiping
accidents involved foreign HGVs.

"The department's accident statistics for 2005 distinguish those accidents
involving left-hand and right-hand vehicles for the first time.

The data shows that Left-hand-drive vehicles were involved in 39%% of all
injury accidents where the vehicle was changing lanes and 52%% of those
incidents where vehicles were moving to the right".

Knight Of The Road wrote in
dIOdnQ8TxpS5u5HYnZ2dnUVZ8qOdnZ2d@bt.com:

I wonder why they only include injury accidents and not *all* collisions,
even those that only involve damage.

Knight Of The Road (russiatrucking@hotmail.com) gurgled happily,
sounding much like they were saying :

So RHD trucks were involved in 61%% of those accidents...

Kinda puts the lie to the "It's usually Foreigners..." claim

However, that's all fairly useless unless you know what percentage of truck
mileage in the UK is LHD?

On Sat, 16 Sep 2006 18:11:43 +0100, Martin Underwood put finger to
keyboard and typed:

"Adrian" gmail.com> wrote

Dover handles 1.8 million trucks a year and it's fairly safe to assume that
each truck travels two ways, so that's 900,000 vehicles making the return
trip each year, of which about 75%% are foreign registered.

That would make 675,000 which, divided by the number of weeks in a year
gives around 13,000 in any given week on the road which have arrived through
Dover. (It's probably less than this since most trucks will stay less than a
week)

If you treble this figure to take into account all other ports (and this is
probably vastly over the true figure) then that gives 40,000
foreign-registered trucks on the road at any given time. There are 420,000
British HGVs registered with DVLA

Just Googled this

"Foreign trucks now represent some ten per cent of the maximum weight
vehicles operating on UK roads - there are around 10,000 foreign lorries on
UK roads every day of the week".

Source http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2005/08/how-about-truck-drivers.html

Which would mean that around 2.5%% of trucks on the road at any given time
are foreign registered.

Knight Of The Road wrote in
f5adnTH5cIXV3JHYnZ2dnUVZ8qWdnZ2d@bt.com:

Martin Underwood (a@b) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying
:

Hmmm This assumes that LHD trucks are ALL foreign. Which we know isn't the
case - IIRC a lot (all? damn near all?) of the UK trans-continental fleet
is LHD.

OK, it's probably not a significant effect.

Anyway - it makes a foreign/LHD truck four times as likely to be involved
in a lane-changing injury crash than a RHD one.

Yet it's portrayed here as being an entirely "Foreign" issue.

"Martin Underwood" wrote

In fact, my estimate was a fair way out, in accordance with the allowances I
made for error.

Figures I found subsequently suggest that 10,000 out of 420,000 trucks on
the road at any given time are foreign-registered which is around 2.5%%

"Adrian" gmail.com> wrote

Hardly any British haulier would specify a LHD vehicle any more- the vast
majority of work for British hauliers is now in the UK.

We *did* order a LHD vehicle around 18 months ago and it had to be built to
UK spec and then imported (and we had to pay a hefty deposit before Volvo
would start building it) which would have been unthinkable ten years ago.

British LHD vehicles are no more likely to be involved in accidents than
british RHD vehicles, hence the almost identical insurance premium we pay.

Sorry if this doesn't suit your agenda.