Weighing machines doing the job as Port Botany overloads fall more than 60 percent
December 19, 2012
New South Wales Roads and Ports Minister Duncan Gay highlighted a reduction in overweight imported containers making their way onto state roads.
Despite the safety gains
and reduction in road surface wear and tear this represents, Gay says initiatives will continue, with Roads and Maritime Services enforcement activities in and around Port Botany aimed at overweight trucks, defective vehicles and poorly restrained loads within containers.
He counts last July’s installation of weighbridges as the catalyst for a “dramatically reduced” incidence of overweight trucks driving from the state’s premier container port.
“I’m proud to say Port Botany is the only port in the country to have installed a network of weigh-in-motion weighbridges to detect, identify and monitor trucks exiting stevedore terminals carrying imported shipping containers,” the minister says.
“Since installing weighbridges in July this year, the percentage of truck axle overloads has dropped from 26 to 10 percent – a 61.5 percent reduction in the number of axle overloads in less than five months.”
The remaining 10 percent of minor (0-5 percent over mass) or substantially (5-20 percent over mass) overweight trucks are directed to adjacent container freight stations for load adjustment to ensure legal weights before being allowed to travel outside the port precinct.
Severely overweight trucks (above 20 percent) cannot leave the port precinct, which has a significant impact on driver hours and truck productivity for which trucking companies can expect little recompense.
These containers have to be transported from stevedore terminals by rail or repacked to legal weights before being allowed back onto a truck for transport.
The State Government says that “a small percentage of rogue transport operators who deliberately avoid pulling into the seven accredited container freight stations are being ‘rounded up’ in a series of on-going enforcement and compliance campaigns in and around the Port Botany precinct”.
