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Oct 30, 2010

OPINION * Australia - Is this the start of something big?


(Video from YouTube, by tgilesau -28 Oct 2010: This A-double combination was built for Woods to run at 30 meters and 79 tonnes into Brisbane Port from Toowoomba. It's the first PBS vehicle of its type in Queensland)

Brisbane,Queensland,Australia -eTruck, by Tim Giles -October 29, 2010: -- This week the Performance Based Standards (PBS) scheme got a shot in the arm with the unveiling of three A-double combinations at O’Phee’s Trailers in Brisbane. They will run at 79 tonnes and 30 metres long hauling two 25 tonne containers at a time from Toowoomba on the Great Dividing Range down to the port in Brisbane. Currently the job is done with single trailers, the number of truck movements of grain in this particular application will be halved... Victoria do have quite a few extra long tipper and dogs on the road. There are also quite a few super B-doubles on severely restricted routes around Melbourne and Brisbane ports. These are hardly going to change the shape of the transport industry... Of course there will be problems and it certainly won’t progress anything like as fast as the trucking industry wants. New South Wales are still very negative about really useful innovation, but when operators there see the gains made the pressure will increase for change... As a cynic it is easy to believe this is yet another proof this extremely expensive and complex scheme will be wasted, getting just a few well designed and highly productive niche operations up and running while the rest of the industry have to continue to battle with overly restrictive prescriptive road rules and ever increasing compliance costs. It’s one of those ‘glass half full, glass half empty’, we have to hope the outlook seems bright but sometimes its is sometimes difficult to remain positive as state and local authorities seem to be forever nitpicking and raising last minute objections...

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