Don't point the finger at trucks for that congestion...

Light goods vehicle traffic continues to rise faster than other vehicle traffic, provisional new statistics from the DfT have shown.

Lights good vehicle traffic jumped 5.8% in 2014 to reach 45.1 billion vehicle-miles compared with an overall increase across all vehicle types of 2.1%. HGV traffic rose 2.2% last year to 16 billion vehicle-miles.

The latest figures mean light goods vehicle traffic is now more than 20% higher than it was 10 years ago; while HGV traffic has fallen by almost 12%.

Car and taxi traffic was up 1.5% to over 243 billion vehicle-miles in 2014 but has - somewhat surprisingly – fallen in the last 10 years by 0.5%.

Separate figures published simultaneously suggested that 78.6% of journeys on the Highways Agency’s network were ‘on time’ in the year to the end of December, though the DfT admitted these figures “do not directly measure whether congestion, in a physical sense, has improved or deteriorated over time”.

The DfT has also published new statistics showing that there were 476,000 licensed HGVs on Great Britain’s roads at the end of Q3 2014 – up from 468,000 a year previously but down from the 510,000 licensed in Q3 2004.

The number of licensed light goods vehicles on GB roads stood at 3.48 million in Q3 2014 – up from 3.36 million a year previously and 2.81 million in Q3 2004.

The number of licensed cars on GB roads, meanwhile, had reached 29.73 million by Q3 2014 – compared to 29.2 million in Q3 2013 and 26.38 million in Q3 2004 – all of which left cars accounting for 82.8% of all vehicles at the end of the quarter, with light goods vehicles at 9.7% and trucks at just 1.3%.