The Campaign For Better Transport

The debate continues over the matter of allowing heavier trucks on New Zealand’s roads, with several regional transport committees stating their opposition to the move.   The Herald reports:

Regional transport committees for most of the upper North Island – including Auckland – oppose allowing heavier trucks on main roads despite Government and industry predictions of productivity gains and fuel savings.

Proposed rule changes to allow bigger trucks, subject to a new permitting system, were hotly debated by Auckland’s regional transport committee before members voted on Wednesday 10-5 to reject them.

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Tim Davin of the Institute of Professional Engineers comments in today’s Herald:

Who will bear the cost of heavier vehicles? Where will the costs of heavier vehicles fall, and will they improve New Zealand’s productivity?

We really don’t know the answers to these questions as the analysis has not been done…[more]

Quite. IPENZ members consist of 10,000 engineers throughout New Zealand.

NZTA have supplied us with a copy of their assessment of heavy trucks on State Highway bridges. The objective of the report is to identify bridges on freight routes that would require strengthening for higher mass limits provide an indication of costs.  The full copy (8Mb) is available here, but some key points are:

Whilst the current legal limit is a gross mass of 44 tonnes, most of the bridges on the state highway network and indeed the local road network were designed and constructed to carry lower loads. However, they continue to perform beyond expectations because of the conservative nature of some designs, material strengths that are higher than allowed for or ongoing upgrades and strengthening programmes.

306 state highway bridges would require strengthening, or detailed investigation and an estimated $85M would be required to fund the work over a period of several years.

Of these bridges, only 13 have already been included on the approved 09/12 Bridge Replacement and Upgrade Programme due to their current condition. The results have not been studied in detail to determine if any of the bridges should be replaced rather than strengthened.

In the South Island, no section of SH1 has bridges that can support 50 tonne trucks.  In the North Island Pokeno – Hamilton – Tirau has strong enough bridges, as does Rotorua – Taupo.  No section of SH1 from Taupo to Wellington has bridges that can support 50 tonne trucks.

It is hard to see how heavy trucks can be introduced to the state highway network without doing the necessary bridge strengthening work first.  The proposed implementation date of 2010 seems overly optimistic.

The Herald reports on our submission on heavy trucks:

Pro-rail campaigners say the Government is seeking public support for heavier trucks without producing evidence of economic benefits to justify the extra wear on the country’s roads.

The Campaign for Better Transport in Auckland says submissions due by Friday on a draft rule change allowing truck loads to be increased to 53 tonnes or more have been hampered by the Ministry of Transport’s refusal to provide a report on claimed productivity benefits from Canterbury road trials.

I don’t think this is an issue so much about road vs rail, but about safety for other road users and the fairness ratepayers, taxpayers and other road users subsidising the trucking industry.

Road users urged to submit against law change allowing bigger trucks

The Campaign For Better Transport is urging concerned road users and organisations to make submissions against the Government’s proposal to let larger and heavier trucks on our roads from next year.

Spokesperson Cameron Pitches says the move would greatly increase the risk of an increase in the number of accidents involving trucks.

“If existing trucks are allowed to carry much heavier loads, braking distances will have to increase leaving less room for error. Rollover accidents are will also be more likely as heavier containers will have a higher centre of gravity,” says Mr Pitches.

“Trucks are already involved in a disproportionate number of accidents. This can only get worse if we allow these changes go through.”

Earlier this year, Police ran a road safety blitz targeting trucks on concerns that half of all fatal accidents on State Highway 1 in the South Island involve trucks.

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Even the motoring fraternity are slowly waking up to the Government’s poor decision making of late.  Alistair Sloane writes in the motoring section of today’s Herald:

High-speed trains in Europe generate between four and 40 times less CO2 per passenger than other modes of transport, says the European Union. It says high-speed rail lines take up half as much space as a motorway, and rail travel uses two to three times less energy than journeys by road. On the other side of the Atlantic, the US Government is looking into the use of diesel hybrid train engines and improved freight and passenger railway networks to ease oil imports and the country’s carbon footprint. Rail, it says, “could be reinvented with a ‘green’ image”. Across the Ditch, natural gas suppliers are upgrading distribution networks so that trucking companies can make more use of the cleaner-burning fuel. The truckies say they want to cut their exposure to volatile diesel prices and make a contribution to Australia’s carbon reduction effort. What do we do in New Zealand? We allow governments and road transport lobbyists to dumb down rail and boost the load-capacity of big diesel trucks. It comes under Kiwi ingenuity.