Lorry Operators Threaten Freight Strike

[george]

Lorry operators threaten freight strike

BANGKOK: -- The Land Transport Federation of Thailand is threatening to halt freight forwarding services nationwide unless the government promises relief from rising fuel prices within seven days - diesel subsidy and loans for converting to gas.

Federation chairman Yu Jienyuenyongpong, flanked by representatives of transport operators in various sectors said in a press conference Wednesday that the continued increase in diesel prices had considerably pushed up the overhead costs of transport truck operators considerably.

Federation secretary-general Thongyoo Kongkan said the government will have seven days to respond with the measures to meet its demands.

The transport of building materials took the heaviest toll since product prices are low while fuel cost had risen by up to 75 per cent.

Mr Yu said that transport of farm products had begun to decline because the harvesting season had gone by. Even so, fuel costs had increased by 60 per cent.

In the past, the operators were allowed to raise the transport cost by 3 per cent every time diesel price edged up by one baht.

But the continued rise in transport costs had reduced the number of customers seeking the services. It resulted in many operators stopping services and selling off 4,000-5,000 trucks.

To ease the hardship of the operators, he said the federation is calling on government to provide fuel at a special discount for the land transport sector, offer a securitisation plan so that operators could afford the natural gas for vehicles (NGV) kit installation, support soft loans with interest lower than 0.5 per cent per annum, and reducing the tax on new trucks with NGV engines to 10 per cent.

In addition, the federation asked the government for financial support through the Energy Conservation Promotion Fund for alternative energy consumption, to provide enough NGV stations in every region, to improve the quality of NGV fuel, and to prepare the NGV consumer plan for medium and long term use.

Mr Thongyoo said that unless there are concrete measures, the federation would stop transport services and a caravan of at least 10,000-12,000 trucks would move to Bangkok.

He said there would be no blockade of any roads, but that the caravan of trucks would be brought in to park somewhere to demonstrate that the operators had insufficient money to fill their trucks fuel tanks.

-- TNA 2008-06-04

[Scott]

So, let's see 10,000 to 12,000 trucks all parked on the road wouldn't be a blockade?!!

[ratcatcher]

Time for the Railway to wake up & smell the diesel!

[Martin]

Actually, the railways here can do very little.

The railway system didn't develop here in the same way as Europe etc, where it developed to shift goods for commerce, and passengers as a sideline.

Here the railways were designed and set up just to shift an Army to any threatened border. Consequently a single line was sufficient, as the troop trains would all be going in the same direction. Also just five main lines were sufficient, without any branch lines.

Before oil gets prohibitively expensive, there is a need to dual the present lines and electrify them. (In the long term, there will always be a modicum of electricity from hydrogeneration, even when fossil-derived hydrocarbons are so short that they all have to go for chemical feedstocks.)

Maybe some branch lines will be built to cities that lie off the main lines.

We have had 200 years of getting massive 'windfalls' of fossil-derived deposits, and have developed lifestyles (and populations) in response. Now that new deposits are getting harder to find, smaller in size, and harder to extract, all sorts of 'downstream' changes will have to occur.

This protest by these truckers that "We can't carry on with 'business as usual' unless we are subsidised" is a symptom of something much bigger.