Wednesday, 28 February 2018
Austroads’ latest report examines the challenges of providing High Productivity Freight Vehicles (HPFV) with access to local roads.
The larger and heavier road freight vehicles of today have the potential to exceed the geometric and structural capacity of our road system. However, access decisions are often not based on infrastructure capacity. Regardless of their basis, barriers must be identified and overcome if Australia’s world-leading progression towards safer and more efficient road freight transport is to continue.
Local road managers are subject to specific challenges not faced by their state and territory counterparts. This, coupled with the importance of local road access to many transport tasks, puts the challenges currently faced by local road managers front and centre in this research.
A comprehensive outline of the contemporary barriers to local road access was compiled following an intensive consultation process including face-to-face interviews with more than 40 professionals from state road authorities, local government associations, local councils, transport industry associations, transport companies and other government agencies, and an online stakeholder survey.
While infrastructure capacity constraints do feature among the barriers, the vast majority of barriers were found to stem from road managers’ incomplete understanding of Performance Based Standards, resource shortages, and areas for improvement in the Heavy Vehicle National Law.
Real-life case studies were compiled to demonstrate how some road managers have overcome concerns about swept path width, intersection clearance time, route compliance, increased infrastructure consumption, bridge loading and stakeholder acceptance to ultimately provide access where it was warranted. Each case study features an introduction describing the access sought, a statement of the problem faced by the road manager, a description of how the problem was overcome, and the key lesson learned.
Ten recommendations for further investigation are presented, focusing on education, funding needs, legislative change, appeals processes, cost recovery frameworks and route assessment guidelines and tools.
Report link: Local Road Access for High Productivity Freight Vehicles
Webinar: Local Road Access for High Productivity Freight Vehicles
This webinar, presented on 27 March 2018, outlines the contemporary barriers to local road access for high productivity freight vehicles, and some of the options available for local road managers when considering road access. The webinar was presented by Rob Di Cristoforo. Download the presentation slides.