Statutes
| Author | O. Kahn‐Freund |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1963.tb00706.x |
| Published date | 01 March 1963 |
| Date | 01 March 1963 |
STATUTES
TRANSPORT
Am,
1962
THE system of English inland transport law, and especially that of
railway law, has been completely transformed by the Transport Act
of
1962.
It
is the most momentous piece of legislation in this field
to have been enacted since the Railway and Canal Traffic Act,
1854,
which
it
repeals. Its impact
on
the common law is even more
profound than that of the
1854
Act.
To understand this statute purely in the context
of
legal devel-
opments is impossible.
It
is comprehensible only as the belated
response of the law to a revolutionary change in the structure of
the transport industry, a change which is itself the outcome
of
technical developments leading to
a
situation unknown at any
earlier stage of
our
civilisation. The new factor is of courseit
is
a
commonplace-that today we have
in
this
and
in
all comparable
countries the simultaneous existence of various methods of traps-
porting passengers and goods, various techniques of camage, repre-
sented partly by public and partly by private enterprise, in circum-
stances which make the operators of these techniques competitors
in
a
keenly contested market. The decisive fact is that the advent
of motor transport and, much later, the advent of air transport did
not displace the railways, as
in
bygone days the railways had
largely displaced the canals and the horse-drawn road vehicles.
Technical progress did not,
in
our
century, substitute one technique
for another;
it
put at the disposal of the customer alternative tech-
niques each of which has certain advantages and certain disadvan-
tages compared with any other from the consumer’s point of view.
When
it
became possible to travel from London to Glasgow by rail,
the idea of travelling by coach became ridiculous, but that one can
fly from London to Glasgow does not necessarily make the use of
the railway either uneconomical
or
unattractive. Similar observa-
tions can be made about goods transport, especially as regards
competition between road and rail. Railway transport is the only
form of transport the operators of which have to provide not only
the vehicles but also the roads. The enormous national capital
investment represented by the railway system and the role the rail-
ways are playing in providing employment for a large section of
the people would have made the displacement of railway transport
by new techniques
a
national calamity. Nothing like this could
have been said of any other form of transport except the canals
whose role in the national life
was,
even in their heyday, much
smaller.
The leitmotiv of the history of transport law i?
in
this country,
174
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