Freight about to crash 4/2/07 - ABC Background Briefing
As consumers demand more and more ’stuff’ the impact on the freight industry will be enormous. The number of trucks on the roads will double in two decades. This will have important implications for traffic, roads, pollution, and energy use. Steve Skinner reports.
THEME
Stephen Skinner: Welcome to Background Briefing on ABC Radio National, I’m Stephen Skinner. And today we’re talking about freight, and lots of it, billions of tonnes moving around the country every year.
CONVOY MUSIC
Stephen Skinner: The movie Convoy was one of a rash of trucking movies like Duel and Smokey and the Bandit to come out of America in the 1970s.
CONVOY DIALOGUE
Stephen Skinner: These old movies are hard to get in video stores these days, but hundreds of the old American trucks that star in them are still running around on Australia’s roads. We need them because the amount of freight moved around Australia has gone through the roof in the past four decades - it’s increased about nine times. And in the next two decades it will double again. If we continue with business as usual, the impacts of pollution and congestion are going to hit the big cities in particular, very hard.
TRUCK SOUNDS
Stephen Skinner: Perhaps the most obvious illustration of the growth in freight can be seen at Australia’s container ports. Container traffic is growing at about six percent a year, and most of the containers are shifted within the cities by a growing convoy of trucks.
Here at Port Botany in Sydney, more than a million containers are handled each year, attracting old trucks like bees to a honeypot. Australia has one of the oldest truck fleets in the Western world.
This light blue cabover Kenworth was built way back in 1972. Like many of the old trucks in the cities it started life running interstate, in this case for Vaughan’s and then TNT. But for the past 21 years its owner has been Sam the Man, who operates several old Kenworths with their trailers down at the docks, and he’s got expansion plans.
Sam’s waiting in an afternoon line-up of trucks to pick up a 23-tonne container load of prawns from the P&O wharf, and he’s already had a long day.
Sam: Well we had a four o’clock start this morning. We have delivered a container up to Wetherill Park, we left the trailer up there, so we came back, we picked up another one, we delivered it to Wetherill Park again. We did this, we just got rid of the empties, so we’re going to get the refrigerated container full of prawns.
Stephen Skinner: That’s coming from where?
Sam: I think it’s coming from - Hong Kong. There you go, so the old girl serves the prawns to the nation again.
Stephen Skinner: And where are you taking the prawns?
Sam: We’re taking it to Granville, which is distributed after. Quite nice prawns, too.
Stephen Skinner: So it’s a seafood distribution place?
Sam: Yes, it’s 23, 24 tonnes, yes.
Stephen Skinner: Who employs you to do this?
Sam: Well we’ve got quite a few. It ranges from fashion to Asian foods, imports, to all sorts of foods, and machinery and whatever. And anything, whatever’s in the containers, we just do it. We’ve got several customers, anything goes.
Stephen Skinner: And you’ve noticed a big increase in container traffic?
Sam: Oh yes, yes, there’s a lot more. This is why I have to buy more trailers, to cater for that increase, drop trailers with the containers on board, get some other ones, yes.
Stephen Skinner: Sam has several other old Kenworths and he’s obviously maintained the ‘72 model he’s driving, well. He’s very proud of what he calls ‘the old girl’.
You almost make it sound like the truck’s human.
Sam: Oh yes, oh yes, the old girl, oh yes, the old girl knows. When I’m tired, she more or less drives herself. But no, not really, I mean you just have to understand when she needs anything done to her, she tells me. This truck, I might add, has never been, touchwood, yet, at the back of the tow truck. Every time, she gave me a warning, just recently, we’ve just got a new clutch in it, just recently she gave me a warning — enough, one or two days, that’s it. ‘Take me home, fix me up’. So you just do it. You don’t argue with her. When she says, ‘I can’t do it any more’, don’t argue, that’s it. So actually we’ve been married for quite a long time, 21 years, more or less.
Stephen Skinner: Sam’s truck is one of more than two million commercial vehicles on Australia’s main roads, moving stuff around. The vast majority of them are delivery vans, maybe carrying only a few parcels at a time. At the other end of the scale are an amazing 70-thousand prime movers, pulling trailers and weighing up to 65 tonnes all-up.
The average age of the big prime movers is about 11 years; for the smaller trucks the average is about 17. And it’s these older trucks and vans that are the worst offenders when it comes to poor fuel economy, and air and noise pollution — and that’s even when their engines are well maintained.
So why are there so many old trucks in Australia? Chief Executive of the Truck Industry Council, Terry Pennington.
Terry Pennington: Well in North America when the trucks get a bit old, they just drive them down to South America. In Western Europe they drive them into Eastern Europe, and in Japan they have a fairly extensive export program. Obviously we don’t have a bridge to somewhere that we can drive them, so they stay. And until recently trucks were relatively expensive. The GST has been good for the truck industry. Prior to it being introduced on 1st July, 2000, we were paying 22-1/2 percent wholesale sales tax on a truck. Then for 12 months we had the GST of 10 percent, and then the Government very, very kindly said, ‘Look, these are working vehicles,’ so now trucks are tax free. That’s seen the market in new vehicles grow significantly, and it’ll take time, but that will also help to significantly reduce the age of the fleet, by bringing the price of vehicles down.
Stephen Skinner: Why is the amount of freight increasing so much, at a rate faster than both population growth and economic growth? Terry Pennington says we all want more stuff, and higher living standards.
Terry Pennington: When I was a kid we had one black-and-white TV, and that was about it in the house. Now you’ve got a couple of TVs, you’ve got a couple of fridges, you’ve got DVDs and a lot of people have two homes, people have two cars, and so on and so forth. It’s just the change in lifestyle, rather than the change in population, and the demand of the consumer.
Stephen Skinner: Terry Pennington, from the Truck Industry Council, which represents the importers and assemblers of new trucks and engines.
There are many other factors accounting for the huge growth in freight. For example, not only do we want more stuff, but we want more varieties of stuff as well. A decade ago the average large supermarket carried about 15,000 different lines of product on its shelves. Today the figure is more like 50,000 or 60,000. There used to be just a few varieties of milk products, for instance; now there are over 40. This all adds to the number of supplier trips.
Increasing imports of food and manufactured goods in containers is another big factor. Containerisation itself increases freight by being such a relatively cheap and efficient means of international transport. Extra trips are generated in Australia because there’s often double handling involved. For example, a container of plastic goods from China may be driven away from the port; its contents then unpacked somewhere else and transferred onto pallets; and then the pallets transported to other warehouses and final destinations all around the city and country.
Of course the resources boom means there’s a huge amount of freight traffic going the other way too, for example primary products like coal, iron ore and grain exported to China.
At Revesby, in Sydney’s west, Lindsay Jones has been selling trucks for nearly three decades. He’s idling this 1978 Kenworth, which is for sale at just $12,000, and he runs through some of its features.
Lindsay Jones: Sleeper cab; it’s the 125; it’s got a GM motor with 440 horsepower; it’s got 15 gears; and it’s a bogey drive at the rear. And a very nice truck.
Stephen Skinner: It still sounds pretty good, considering it’s 30 years old.
Lindsay Jones: Well it’s the way they’re maintained. If you do the right thing and maintain it correctly, and most people know how to do that, you’ll get a good life out of these vehicles.
Stephen Skinner: So it’s got a bit of life left in it yet?
Lindsay Jones: Oh most certainly, yes. It’d have another ten years without any problems. But it’s been very well maintained, as I say.
Stephen Skinner: What work did it used to do, do you know?
Lindsay Jones: Well it used to do long distance, and now it’s done local containers for about the last ten years, so it’s a local truck.
Stephen Skinner: And what’s the asking price?
Lindsay Jones: $12,000, it’s a ‘78 model.
Stephen Skinner: Is it possible to put a figure for the number of k’s its done?
Lindsay Jones: Oh, look, the truck could have done two to three million k’s in its life if it’s done long distance. But very good condition for its age.
Stephen Skinner: Lindsay Jones identifies one of the major reasons for the growth in freight transport: it’s easy — some say too easy — to get into the trucking game. A legion of small operators are the backbone of the industry, and competition to keep freight rates low is often ruthless. Australian customers enjoy one of the cheapest trucking systems in the western world.
The old Kenworth is a steal at just $12,000, but Lindsay Jones says whoever buys it might get a shock at the ongoing costs, of maintenance, fuel, registration, insurance and so on — compared with what an owner-driver is likely to earn anyway. At the docks that would be in the ballpark of $65 an hour, which includes the costs of running the prime mover and trailer.
Lindsay Jones: A lot of them like to be self-employed, there’s nothing wrong with that, and a lot of them really like driving a heavy vehicle. To some people it’s a lot of fun whilst trying to earn some money. Unfortunately, sometimes they don’t realise how much money it costs to run a truck, before they enter in.
Stephen Skinner: So there’s always new players to fall into that trap?
Lindsay Jones: Yes there is. Not as many as there used to be 20 years ago, there’s far less. But there still are people that unfortunately don’t realise how much it costs to run. And the same old story, you know, they’re not paid enough, ever enough.
Stephen Skinner: Is there a solution to guys getting into the game ignorant of the full running costs, and how to run a small business properly?
Lindsay Jones: I think it’s essential that they have some form of course that they have to pass, a knowledge test, as to what exactly it costs to run a vehicle, and in turn associated areas such as your bookwork, etc. etc. So they need to run a course and they need to be examined on it, nothing dramatic, but just so they totally understand exactly how much it costs to a run a vehicle.
Stephen Skinner: A couple of official inquiries have recommended the same type of course that Lindsay Jones is talking about.
Half an hour’s drive away at Arndell Park is Sydney Truck Sales, a dealer for the giant Italian truck and van manufacturer, Iveco, which is owned by Fiat. Iveco regional sales manager, Eddie Hood, deals mainly with both big and small fleet operators. He says competition at that level is intense as well.
Eddie Hood: Competition in this business, in the heavy truck business, is aggressive like you wouldn’t imagine. I mean the businesses themselves as you might imagine, if you carry a number of trucks in stock, the businesses are very capital-intensive; they employ lots of people, so it’s labour intensive; and yet the ferocity in the marketplace is aggressive. So yes, it is a tough business to be in, and that is for sure.
Stephen Skinner: Another factor which generates a lot of extra freight movements is the trend to a practice called ‘Just In Time’ logistics. In other words, trucks and vans are warehouses on wheels. ‘Just In Time’ helps to explain the proliferation of delivery vans buzzing around. Eddie Hood:
Eddie Hood: One of the fundamental efficiencies in business is not to carry huge amounts of inventory. And the way to do that is to have your inventory in transit, so the idea is that you don’t have inventory in any one spot. So it comes direct from the supplier and reaches your business just in time to be utilised, and in that way your business is less capital intensive, and the whole efficiency of what you’re doing is better handled. And that’s more and more coming in to play and people are demanding that sort of service. By inventory, I mean component parts, whether you’re making cars, or you’re making pizzas. The idea is to have the minimum amount of the component parts on stock at any one time.
Stephen Skinner: In other words, they don’t have as much stock in warehouses any more?
Eddie Hood: Well the ideal inventory is in transit or in the air, so yes, if you can have none, that’s the best type of business to be running, but everyone needs a certain amount of it, but by and large, there should be very little held in storehouses.
Do you want to jump up inside there Steve?
Here we go. Iveco trucks always start first time, Steve.
TRUCK STARTS
Stephen Skinner: It’s remarkably quiet inside here.
Eddie Hood: Yes, it certainly is. Modern trucks have a lot of computers on board, and information needs to flow all over the truck. So we need to know what’s going on in the rear axles, what’s going on with the braking, what’s going on with the turbo-charger, with oil levels, and information is just flowing back and forward through the vehicle. So one of the consequences of that is that when we start a vehicle, we should not drive for a period of five seconds, or 10 seconds, just enough to allow the computer just to run through the truck and tell us that everything’s in order.
Stephen Skinner: It’s mainly the fleets which buy the new trucks and vans, and enjoy the benefits that come with them such as tax breaks, greater fuel efficiency, better reliability, modern technology such as automated gear boxes, driver comfort, and so on.
Eddie Hood: … Here we go. We’re going in reverse, you see how easy it was to go?
Stephen Skinner: For about $220,000 you get all this with the top of the range Iveco Stralis, a 550 horsepower prime mover suitable for pulling B-Double trailers. B-Doubles are those big one-and-a-half trailers you now see on both country highways and urban roads. A new pair of those will set you back another $120,000.
Iveco’s Eddie Hood says better fuel efficiency is a feature of new trucks, and can give operators an advantage no matter what volatile fuel prices might actually be at the time.
Eddie Hood: Demand for fuel efficiency is second to none. So we just had a look here at this Stralis AS, and I will tell you that the running costs of a truck like this, say doing 180,000, 200,000 kilometres per year, fuel per month will probably set you back $15,000. So that’s a huge expense. So if we can save one percent or two percent of those costs, it’s a massive opportunity and comes straight off the bottom line, or saves money. So fuel efficiency is paramount.
Stephen Skinner: An important advantage of the newest trucks and vans is their tougher emission standards. Most trucks and vans bought before 1996 have no emissions equipment at all. But now when Eddie Hood revs the brand new Stralis, you can’t see any smoke.
Eddie Hood: The world just demands it, doesn’t it. I mean we want a future for our children, our grandchildren, and that’s the way we need to go, so we need to clean up our act, everybody. That’s for sure.
SHUTS DOWN TRUCK
Stephen Skinner: Diesel engines are simpler, more fuel-efficient and reliable, and longer-lasting than petrol engines. That’s why the proportion of diesel vehicles, including diesel cars, is growing all the time.
But the diesel combustion process produces a lot more particles, in other words, tiny bits of soot. You see the largest particles as smoke from exhausts, but it’s the ones that you can’t see which are more dangerous Some of them are so small they can only be seen with an electron microscope. These micro particles are now recognised around the world as a major health risk, for conditions like bronchitis, asthma and even lung cancer.
Energy Manager for the Murray-Goulburn dairy company, which has a large fleet of diesel trucks, is Leon Ryan.
Leon Ryan: The evidence now that the micro particulates from diesel, it’s not just the heavy stuff you see, but it’s micro particulates, are going to be the ones that the world will be focused on in the future. Without being alarmist, I think that’s going to be the new asbestos of the future. Unless we get on top of particle emissions, and certainly regulations will address a lot of that, with particulate traps and catalytic converters and so on, that diesel, whilst it’s a good fuel, it’s a pretty dirty fuel.
HARRIS STREET ATMOSPHERE
Stephen Skinner: It’s hard to imagine anywhere in Australia having more micro particle pollution from vehicles than Harris Street, near Sydney’s Central Station. It’s a major route for cars and vans and trucks cutting across the city. Watching the passing parade of smoke-blowing diesels with me is Mark McKenzie, consultant to State and Federal governments on transport and the environment.
Mark McKenzie: Our concern with particulates, which are the little bits of soot that come out of exhaust pipes, is that they generally tend to get past your filtration systems in the body. They get absorbed into the lung and because they’re sort of hot carbon particles, they can be ingested into the alveoli of the lungs, and if you’re exposed to that over large periods of time, there are suggestions from the health fraternity that they actually can create cancer. And so it’s really a case of saying if you can avoid being exposed - and I’m talking about a long exposure, living by it, working by it for long periods - it’s really something that you need to try and avoid.
Stephen Skinner: What about the child care centres? Child care centres are frequently near main roads.
Mark McKenzie: Yes. Some of the local councils have actually started to change their planning instruments to prevent child cares being located near roads, predominantly for that reason, they’re concerned about the air quality that comes from the traffic passing by.
You see this truck’s a rigid truck, it’s about three years old, and there’s not much soot coming out of that truck at all because it’s operating with the latest emission standards for new vehicles.
Stephen Skinner: So that’s good. Now that Mack is considerably older.
Mark McKenzie: Yes, that is a considerably older truck and I think one of the things we’ve noticed in dealing with the fleet is that emission standards for which these vehicles were made, have been progressively tightened since about 1995. So if you’re dealing with the older trucks, you’ll find that they’re a lot dirtier, they’ll give you that plume of smoke which is fairly typical of what people associate with trucks. But the very modern vehicles are actually getting very clean and the exhaust is about the same as you’d get out of your normal petrol driven car.
Stephen Skinner: There’s lots of smaller old trucks; how polluting are they?
Mark McKenzie: The smaller trucks, depending upon whether they’re powered by petrol or diesel, but they can be just as dirty as the bigger trucks. Obviously the engine is smaller so they’re not generating as much pollution in total. But I think the thing to remember when you start to look at trucks is there’s about two million light trucks in the national fleet compared with about 350,000 of the rigid trucks — sort of garbage truck size — and about 70,000 of the semi-trailers and B-doubles. So by proportion, the smaller trucks account for the vast majority of the commercial vehicle fleet, and the majority of them run in urban areas.
Stephen Skinner: So they account for the vast majority of the pollution as well?
Mark McKenzie: No, the larger trucks tend to do more kilometres, so it depends upon what pollutant you’re talking about, but certainly generating pollution in urban areas, it’s the small trucks and vans that we really need to concentrate on.
Stephen Skinner: There’s increasing numbers of the big trucks in urban areas too, of course.
Mark McKenzie: That’s right. We’re starting to see as freight needs to be moved around town, we’re seeing that task grow all the time, cities are becoming bigger, so we’re starting to use the bigger trucks to haul freight around the cities. Unfortunately they tend to be the older trucks, the ones that are more polluting, and we’re using the very modern trucks running backwards and forwards between Sydney and Melbourne, Melbourne and Brisbane. Whereas if you really had your way from an air pollution perspective, you’d be doing it the other way around: the old trucks would be running on the highways.
Stephen Skinner: Transport consultant Mark McKenzie advocates a ‘cash for clunkers’ scheme, where the truck and van manufacturers, with help from governments, would buy up old bangers and send them to the scrapyard for recycling.
Terry Pennington from the Truck Industry Council doesn’t go along with that idea. Instead he advocates hitting the owners of old trucks in the hip pocket, via the fuel tax system.
Terry Pennington: There is a diesel rebate where the government rebates 18 cents of the excise, and that comes back to the operators of diesel vehicles in particular. It’s a set figure, regardless of the age of the truck. Now our view is that the newer trucks, which meet the more stringent emissions standards, should get a higher rebate, and those which would be pre-1996, or those vehicles that don’t meet any emission standard, shouldn’t get a rebate.
Stephen Skinner: Most trucks and vans more than ten years old in Australia emit a whopping 20 times more particles than the very latest diesels. And that’s assuming the old truck engines are maintained to the best of their capability, rather than running rough and blowing a lot of smoke, like this one.
TRUCK STARTING UP AND IDLING
Stephen Skinner: This 20-year-old tray-top truck is blowing smoke constantly, even though it’s just idling. The owner didn’t know it’s actually against the law for engines to blow smoke for longer than 10 seconds straight, because that’s a sign of gross particle emissions and an engine that’s not being properly maintained.
ENGINE SPUTTERS OUT
Stephen Skinner: In the year 2000, the Federal and State governments came up with various plans on how to minimise the emissions from old diesels. They included testing exhausts and getting the engines fixed if they’re found to be running rough; and fitting particle filters to old engines.
Seven years down the track, and a reliable emissions test has been developed, and the benefits of engine repairs proven. But a government discussion paper points out there is no comprehensive testing in any States, and that Western Australia doesn’t even enforce the 10-second smoke test rule.
Mark McKenzie confirms that progress on the most polluting older vehicles has been slow.
Mark McKenzie: We haven’t really seen a focus on the older vehicles. We’ve tended to actually focus on emission standards for the newer vehicles, working on the premise that as you put tighter standards into the new vehicles, they would replace the older vehicles, and so you start to get a cleaner fleet. Well that’s not what’s happened in Australia. What we’ve actually seen is that the fleet’s grown. The newer vehicles haven’t replaced the older vehicles, they’ve just come in and added to the vehicle fleet. And as our older vehicles have aged, the natural issues of wear and tear mean that in fact the performance of those vehicles in the field is even worse than what they were originally manufactured for.
Stephen Skinner: Transport consultant Mark McKenzie.
DEVONDALE AD
Stephen Skinner: Devondale is the brand name of Australia’s biggest dairy processor, Victoria’s Murray-Goulburn Co-operative.
Milk processing is a classic example of yet another reason for the big increase in freight, and that’s production being centralised in fewer, bigger plants.
Background Briefing went for a drive with one of Murray-Goulburn’s B-Double tanker drivers, Stewart McKane. It was part of a round trip of more than 800 kilometres, with a load of cream from the Koroit plant west of Melbourne, to the Leongatha long-life UHT plant to the south-east of the metropolis.
Here Stewart McKane is approaching the Westgate Bridge on the way back, empty, and he’s checking in with his boss on the two-way radio.
TWO WAY RADIO RINGS, CONVERSATION WITH SUPERVISOR
Stewart McKane: Oh right, OK. I’ll drop him off there and I’ll head for home. I’ve got over half a tank of gas here, a full tank of diesel, so we’ll be right. All right, no worries, we’ve hit peak hour but we’re getting through it.
Boss: OK. Thanks mate.
Stewart McKane: No worries, I’ll talk to you later. ‘Bye.
We’ve struck peak hour, would you believe. That runs from about 4 o’clock, till 7 o’clock by the looks of it. We’re just getting on the Westgate now, so normally just over the other side between there and Geelong’s going to be a nightmare, but you’ll avoid all that, I’ll have dropped you off by then. And I’ll mosey on back to Koroit, my little country town. Enjoy the quiet life again. Different to this rat race. As I said earlier, this is the best view of Melbourne, in my rear vision mirrors. It’s a good sight, isn’t it?!
Stephen Skinner: High up in the cab of the Kenworth gives a great view of Melbourne’s docks on either side of the Westgate bridge.
Murray-Goulburn is one of the biggest users of containers out of these docks. Its milk products are shipped all over the world. One of the selling points to environmentally-conscious customers in Europe is the fact that 30 of Murray-Goulburn’s prime movers are powered by Caterpillar engines using what’s regarded as clean, green, natural gas — or methane. It’s in deep-frozen liquid form, supplied by energy company Kleenheat to fill special truck tanks fitted by Advanced Fuels Technology.
Liquefied Natural Gas, or LNG, is the same fuel that Australia exports by the billions of dollars’ worth on the special tankers to China and Japan. LNG is not to be confused with LPG, that’s liquefied petroleum gas, the type used in cars. Nor is LNG to be confused with CNG, compressed natural gas, used widely in many city bus fleets in Australia and commercial vehicles overseas. Both LNG and CNG are processed from Australia’s vast reserves of natural gas, and are far cheaper than diesel, which currently costs about $1.30 a litre.
The next day I go to the Murray-Goulburn headquarters at Brunswick. From here, the co-operative controls a third of Australia’s milk production. Murray-Goulburn energy manager, Leon Ryan, crunches the numbers on the previous day’s truck trip.
Leon Ryan: For the round trip yesterday from Koroit to Leongatha and back to Koroit, which is a round trip of 844 k’s, we averaged a substitution rate of 74 percent, so we replaced 74 percent of the diesel we would have normally used on that trip, with gas. And that resulted in a $135 saving just on that one trip. So you can see that you haven’t got to do too many kilometres to start pulling the cost of the conversion back. And keep in mind that we justified this first on the price of diesel at 80 cents, and it’s now at - well, you know what it is now.
Stephen Skinner: And how much do you pay for the gas now?
Leon Ryan: I’ll say that we’re paying a very good price for the gas, and it’s below 30 cents a litre, I’ll say that. Keeping in mind though, that a litre of gas is not a litre of diesel equivalent. You have to burn 1.64 litres of gas to give you the equivalent litre of diesel.
Stephen Skinner: There have been plenty of technical hitches to overcome, but Murray-Goulburn is so happy with the LNG trial, which was partly funded by the Australian Greenhouse Office, that it’s converting 16 more trucks to natural gas.
SOUND OF GAS BOWSER
Back in Sydney an Iveco cement mixer fills up at a compressed natural gas bowser at Moorebank. The truck is owned by construction materials giant Boral, which is trialling five cement mixers powered by Cummins-Westport engines using CNG — that’s the same fuel that buses use. Construction accounts for a huge amount of the truck traffic and freight on urban roads — bigger new homes alone account for a lot of it.
TRUCK DRIVES OFF
Stephen Skinner: Consultant Mark McKenzie says Australian politicians, gas companies and overseas engine makers need to do a lot more together on natural gas, whether it be in compressed or liquefied form. He says gas could potentially replace 20 percent of diesel.
Mark McKenzie: Yes, liquefied natural gas is a relatively new fuel in terms of it being available for transport. It’s been around for a while, but certainly in relation to transport it’s appeared on the agenda in the last five years. But I suppose there’s a wider point here Steve, of actually saying well natural gas as a whole doesn’t appear on the agenda, and whether you’re talking about the government, the opposition, the Greens or any other party, it seems to be a fuel which for some reason has been overlooked. And that’s a little bit confusing, given the sort of stuff that’s actually occurred in relation to the use of natural gas in bus fleets around the country, and also the sorts of programs that are now being run in the heavy vehicle industry in terms of trialling LNG.
Stephen Skinner: So natural gas has got good potential, you think?
Mark McKenzie: Yes, definitely. I think of all the fuels that are around at the moment, natural gas is probably one of the few that will deliver an economic win in terms of savings to vehicle operators, and I suppose there’s also a flow-on saving there to all of us, in terms of the fact that we consume goods and services that are moved by trucks. So if you can actually contain the costs by using an indigenous fuel, like natural gas, then there’s also a secondary win in terms of savings of moving costs of goods and services. And I suppose the second issue is that it’s actually quite good environmentally, in terms of both greenhouse and air quality, the trials have shown that natural gas can potentially, where it’s in the right technology, deliver very good greenhouse outcomes and good air quality outcomes.
Stephen Skinner: Mark McKenzie.
TRUCK RADIO CLIP
Stephen Skinner: Truck Radio broadcasts after midnight on regional networks to those driving through the night.
TRUCK ENGINE BRAKE
Stephen Skinner: This is the sound you often hear of the engine brakes on big American trucks. New trucks are getting quieter though, and the National Transport Commission wants to make the loudest engine brakes on older trucks illegal.
Truck noise is not going to go away, because of the ever-growing freight task. The National Transport Commission and the trucking industry itself, have a solution to the challenge of much bigger freight movements: they want much bigger trucks.
On outback highways Australia already has road trains, the biggest truck and trailer combinations in the world. What’s at issue is how big can the trucks get on the major highways and in the cities. In urban areas, various trials have been going on of all sorts of configurations, including longer rigid trucks; longer semi-trailers with quad-axles –that’s four sets of axles at the back rather than the standard three; Super B-Doubles — that’s two full-size trailers rather than the current one-and-a-half; and even B-Triples, three trailers. You don’t see these in the cities yet, but you might soon.
Kim Hassall is Associate Professor in Freight and Logistics at Melbourne University; a consultant to government transport agencies; and a councillor with the Australian Trucking Association. He supports the plan that bigger trucks like these be allowed on certain roads if they’re proven to be safe.
Kim Hassall: The types of vehicles generally are larger vehicles, but in fact their safety, their performance and their productivity is generally better than anything that’s actually on the road now. And regulators should be embracing these vehicles because they’re going to help us dampen, not the growth of the freight task, but how that freight task is actually delivered, so that we don’t want doubling of the urban kilometres, doubling of the hours the trucks are on the road, as we may see if we adopt a sort of laissez-faire attitude of keeping the weights, dimensions and types of vehicles the same now as they were ten years ago. And it was very interesting to see on 5th December the Super B-Double 40-foot plus, two 40-foot containers on a quad axle Super B-Double down at the port of Melbourne, and it was very heartening to know that VicRoads as the State regulator down here, is trying to open up about 10 particular arterial roads to access the port, so those vehicles can be used. They will save perhaps anything up to 50 percent of the trips for certain types of freight that are actually going to the port at the moment when the adoption of these vehicles actually happens.
Stephen Skinner: Kim Hassall was about to go to China, where Australia’s problems are magnified many times over. He says the Chinese are tentative about adopting B-Doubles and other large vehicles, but he suspects they won’t have any choice.
Kim Hassall: In fact I advised a delegation recently from Shenzhen — which I think in two years’ time will probably see the container numbers beat Hong Kong and Shanghai, which are the current other two very, very major container ports in the world — to actually introduce B-Doubles, Super B-Doubles and B-Triples, to try and get trials actually going in that city, because otherwise it’s going to be a very congested area. Shenzhen at the moment has grown 100,000 commercial vehicles a year for each of the last ten years. There’s now a million commercial vehicles in a city that has grown by 10 million people in that last ten years. And so they’ve got to do something better. So the whole strategy of picking up and putting down containers at ports; inter-modal rail shuttles; Super B-Doubles; they’ve got to embrace — it’s not just one of those concepts –they’ve got to embrace the lot.
Stephen Skinner: Kim Hassall says in Australia, along with bigger trucks, would go tougher access rules at the ports; and modern internet-based container matching technology.
Kim Hassall: The big ports in Australia, and we’ve got five pretty big ports, sometimes some of those trucks run 70 percent of the time empty to or from the port. That’s crazy in my view. I think there’s got to be business rule changes whereby if you want to pick up a container, you drop one off, if you drop one off, you pick one up. Now with B-Doubles, Super B-Doubles and B-Triples, eventually in 15, 20 years time, maybe you only get to drive to the port if you actually drop off three containers and pick three up. So that the business rules for road access change totally. Usually ports are surrounded by container parks, we have truck movements to those container parks, those container parks are generally in inner suburban areas, a lot of the people who live in those inner suburban areas, it drives them to total distraction. Wouldn’t it be nice if some factory in the eastern or western suburbs could actually find an empty container not from the container park, but from a manufacturer who’s just had an empty container become available at their factory one suburb away? So this virtual matching of empty containers and businesses, with proper databases and proper electronic business models can actually match these requirements with where containers actually are. And so we won’t see the proliferation of container parks — for instance I think there’s about a dozen of them in the Maribyrnong area of Melbourne, and there’s plans afoot to actually even put more in. And certainly we’d suspect that the virtual container matching that is in trial in the Port of New York and the Port of New Jersey at this current point of time, is an absolute godsend for the people who live in those areas.
Stephen Skinner: Of course most of the room on our urban roads is taken up by a legion of mostly cars, along with vans and other small commercial vehicles. Like many transport economists, Kim Hassall favours a carrot and stick approach to the traffic jams they cause — and that’s combining improved public transport with an electronic congestion tax in peak hours.
Kim Hassall: Some state governments think that they’ve implemented tollways, therefore they’ve implemented road pricing, whereas that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg. Many people are aware that congestion pricing was introduced in the CBD area or the central cordon district of London, and that has proved pretty successful, and perhaps like the gas utility, the electricity utility and the phone bill, eventually you may get a road use bill as well.
Stephen Skinner: Associate Professor Kim Hassall from Melbourne University.
The transport chain to and from the docks to various interstate, regional and city centres, takes in millions of trucking kilometres.
The last link in a huge interlocking freight supply chain like this are the vans. Cities are crowded with them as they dart about delivering everything from food to computers to underwear, always in a hurry, always looking for a loading zone.
Background Briefing producer Angus Kingston took a ride with a remarkably relaxed van driver called Steve, who doesn’t think city traffic is much of a problem at all.
Steve: Actually I think the traffic is a lot better than what it was 15 years ago, because the traffic flows better. More clearways, the lights are more informed with each other, in line with each other, so that everything runs a lot more smoothly.
Angus Kingston: So you work as a sole trader?
Steve: As a sole trader type of thing, I just work for myself. They allocate the work and I go and pick it up and then take it to wherever it’s got to go.
Angus Kingston: And you’ve always got a parcel on board going somewhere?
Steve: Pretty well much. I start off in the morning with a mail run, and then I pick up from the Northern Beaches, and then I start heading over to the southern suburbs, the city, and just keep working from there. So it’s pretty well all day.
Angus Kingston: There’s no waste of travel time with an empty van?
Steve: Only when you sort of got your last before you go home, and that could be half an hour from your last drop to home.
Angus Kingston: What time of day do you start in the morning?
Steve: I’m fairly lucky, I don’t start till half past seven, but a lot of the fellows start at six. I finish around about 4.30, 5 o’clock, and most of the others are going through till 7 o’clock.
Angus Kingston: Couriers like you in vans like this move a lot of stuff around. Are you surprised by the ever-increasing reliance on couriers?
Steve: It’s not going to go away, people are still going to need things moved from A to B, and couriers are probably the easiest way of getting things done. Our company has half-hour, one-hour, four-hours, all day, next day, so you’ve got a lot of choice depending on what they’re trying to move. If you go with the flow, you’re going to get there. If you try and change lanes, and dart here, dart there, you’re only going to make it worse further up the line. I get irate with the like that they just want to get to their destination as fast as they can, but they don’t think about anybody else, they only think about themselves, they’ve sort of got blinkers on. And they’re a bit of a trouble, but the general motorist, you go with the flow and you get there.
Stephen Skinner: Coping with traffic with the doubling of freight in the future is going to take more of that kind of easygoing attitude.
Our experience wasn’t so good one day last month.
Right on 5 o’clock I got stuck in a crawl in Sydney’s M5 East tunnel near the docks, with a container truck alongside and a ribbon of smaller vehicles ahead. Then three quarters of an hour later I’m on the M4 in the western suburbs. This is the one that a lot of motorists call an expensive car park, and sure enough we came to a complete halt.
There’s cars and a lesser number of trucks as far as the eye can see ahead, so while I’m parked here doing nothing, I may as well read from a story in today’s paper. The first paragraph reads: ‘At or near choke point already, Sydney’s roads will be jammed by a trucking boom tipped to outstrip growth in private car use, a Federal Government study warns.’
Hello, we’ve started moving a little bit.
As it turned out, the problem was stickybeaks slowing down to check out a minor accident.
SONG “I WISH I WAS A TRAIN”
Stephen Skinner: Troy Cassar-Daley obviously has fond memories of a childhood when trains carried a lot more of Australia’s freight. Some transport authorities are again looking closely at rail to solve some of the problems of getting goods out of ports and off the highways. Rail freight transport is much safer, and three times more fuel efficient than trucking.
But general rail freight in many parts of Australia is plagued with problems of reliability and speed. It’s losing rather than gaining market share on Australia’s busiest freight corridor: that’s from Melbourne to Sydney to Brisbane.
Major reasons for this include freight trains having to give way to passenger trains on city tracks; city dwellers not wanting new rail terminals in their backyard; and 19th century alignments which twist and turn between the cities, with long lengths of single track where trains can’t pass each other.
However, there’s some movement at the station. The Federal Government-owned Australian Rail Track Corporation is investing $2-billion on improving some of the worst parts of the lines between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
But even some of the simplest and cheapest improvements are a long time coming. Take the archaic signalling system between Brisbane and Casino on the New South Wales North Coast. Trains have to stop five times in the space of just 150 kilometres so the driver can hop out to place a metal rod in a signal box. The whole process adds an extra three-quarters of an hour to the trip. Here’s part of a 7.30 Report story which highlighted the problem way back in 1998:
Reporter: Barely out of Brisbane, 20 minutes in fact, the massive train grinds to a halt, so the driver or his offsider can get out and work the signal box.
Driver: It’s really like a relay baton system to tell you the truth. I mean what we’re doing is, it’s a safe working system, we take what’s called an electric staff out of these particular signal boxes, and that gives us possession of the track for the next section, which could be 20, or 40 K. It’s a slow process, a very safe process, but it’s been around since the 1920’s.
Stephen Skinner: The Rail Track Corporation has confirmed to Background Briefing that a modern electronic signalling system which has been on the drawing boards for years, and was finally supposed to be in place last year, now won’t be finished until the end of this year.
Chair of the House of Representatives Transport Committee, Paul Neville, is appalled.
Paul Neville: And to think we have the old metal rod system — I well remember that as a kid, as the steam trains came in, the hoop was handed down and the rod was placed into the mechanism to free up the next section of track. And to think that we’re doing that now in a modern electronic age, is almost beyond belief.
Stephen Skinner: Paul Neville is the National Party Member for Hinkler, based at Bundaberg in Queensland. He says both urban and country roads will have trouble coping if the Government doesn’t spend a proportionately greater amount on train tracks over the next decade.
Paul Neville: We know that the freight task is going to double in the next 20 years, and because of that, our roads will become totally and utterly congested if we don’t do something serious about rail in that time. I’m saying if we’re not progressing rail in parallel with road, in other words if rail doesn’t really catch up, all we’re doing is exacerbating the amount of freight that will go on the newly upgraded roads, and that would be ones like the Hume Highway and the Pacific Highway. Only at Christmas time I drove the Pacific Highway and the amount of traffic on that is quite horrendous.
Stephen Skinner: Paul Neville says there needs to be a rapid further upgrading of the existing rail lines between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. And he says the Government should also provide seed funding to the consortium which wants to build an new inland rail line from Melbourne to Brisbane and beyond. Mr Neville says his personal view is that the inland line should be the Government’s highest priority when it considers the next round of transport infrastructure spending, which he expects to be this year.
Meanwhile down at the docks at Port Botany, Sam the Man has to go and pick up his container-load of frozen prawns.
Sam: I’d better go. I’ll catch you later.
Stephen Skinner: Thanks, Sam.
Sam: I’ll even give you the horn. How’s that?
HORN
Sam: Well that was the horn. OK guys, I’ll see you later.
DRIVES OFF
THEME
Stephen Skinner: Background Briefing’s Co-ordinating Producer is Angus Kingston. Research, Anna Whitfeld. Executive Producer is Kirsten Garrett. I’m Stephen Skinner and you’re listening to ABC Radio National.
Presenter
Steve Skinner
Producer
Steve Skinner
This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.
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