RMS report highlights 2020 truck compliance gains

Fewer inspections so far in 2020 but results relatively positive

 

NSW Roads and Maritime Services (RMS) recently released its heavy vehicle compliance report for the first quarter of 2020, highlighting a slight improvement on previous quarters from nearly 70,000 inspections.

Heavy Vehicle Compliance Snapshot showed the January-March quarter experienced the lowest number of vehicle units inspected over the last five quarters (68,303), resulting in an 87.8 per cent compliance rate.

That figure, excluding inspections and notices issued through the Heavy Vehicle Inspection Scheme (HVIS), is an improvement of 0.5 per cent over the previous quarter (2019 Q4) as well as the same time in last year’s quarter (2019 Q1) (87.3 per cent).

A total of 10,331 notices were issued to 8,355 vehicle units, with 6,424 of those being defect notices issued during enforcement programs including Heavy Vehicle Safety Stations, On-Road Enforcement and Special Operations, with the following breakdown:

  • 4,144 (64.5 per cent) minor defect
  • 1,582 (24.6 per cent) self-clearing defect
  • 10 (0.2 per cent) formal warning defect
  • 652 (10.1 per cent) major defect
  • 36 (0.6 per cent) major grounded defect.

Meanwhile, total defect notices (10,693) through HVIS are 2.1 per cent (231) less than the five-year average, with the proportion of defect notices reducing by 7.0 per cent and 0.7 per cent respectively for minor and major defects compared to the previous five-year average, pivoting towards formal warning and self clearing notice (7.8 per cent greater).

The report indicates that brakes continue to be the most common fault type, comprising 19.6 per cent of minor and 3.4 per cent of major defects.

Ancillary equipment is next overall, though with a higher proportion of minor (20.5 per cent) but lower major (1.8 per cent) defects.

Body and chassis (14.5/1.2 per cent) and suspension (9.7/1.3 per cent) follow.  

Load type sees general freight (3,557) and unladen (1,748) issued the most notices, followed by more specific sectors including aggregate/soil (781), building materials/supplies (651), primary produce (643), groceries (548) and machinery (527).


How the truck and dog sector copped stick from NSW authorities last year


The high construction-related focus in those findings somewhat aligns with the statistic that the compliance rate for Sydney sector is lowest at 60.8 per cent with 15,144 vehicle units inspected and 6,355 notices issued.

By contrast, the northern sector had experienced the highest compliance rate of 89.3 per cent with 31,811 vehicle units inspected and 3,928 notices issued.

The main rise in breach notices was for mass, up by 2.1 per cent for the quarter, with load restraint and fatigue breach notices decreased by less than 1 per cent compared to the previous quarter.

 

Send this to a friend