Roadworthiness: uniformity crucial

The Australian Trucking Association has stressed the importance of adopting a consistent and uniform approach to heavy vehicle roadworthiness and related enforcement, as part of its response to the National Transport Commission's recent regulatory impact statement on the subject.

In carrying out its review of heavy vehicle roadworthiness in this country, in late January the NTC released a paper detailing four potential packages of options.

In making its submission on the NTC's proposals, the ATA's CEO, Chris Melham, said a consistent national approach to the subject and related enforcement was long overdue.

"The trucking industry is strongly in favour of nationally uniform enforcement, including standard rules for vehicle inspections and defect assessments," he said.

"The current roadworthiness rules are sometimes applied haphazardly or wrongly at the roadside. Clear, nationally accepted rules need to be established for declaring a vehicle roadworthy, and for issuing and clearing minor and major defect notices. There must also be consistent national training for enforcement officers."

Mr Melham also said existing Chain of Responsibility legislation should be extended to encompass heavy vehicle roadworthiness, a measure the ATA put forward among a raft of proposed CoR revisions it announced in early February 2015.

"The ATA has put forward a comprehensive set of reforms to Chain of Responsibility, which would extend CoR to roadworthiness while at the same time reducing the complexity of the law," he said.

The ATA has called for governments to maintain their current periodic inspection regimes until further evidence has been collated to support any future revisions.

"The NTC consultation RIS acknowledges there is inadequate evidence (and often conflicting information) about the effectiveness of roadworthiness policies, and for periodic scheduled inspections in particular," he said.

"Scheduled inspections are a rigid, high-cost enforcement tool. It is often said that they only establish roadworthiness on one day of the year: the day a truck is inspected.

"There is no solid evidence to support the introduction of scheduled inspections in states where they are not currently done. There is also no solid evidence to support their removal in the states that require them.

"Given the lack of evidence for or against scheduled inspections, and in line with the principles of evidence-based policy, the ATA believes it would be prudent to hold off making major and costly policy decisions about this specific issue until there is more evidence.

"The submission recommends that governments should fund a major case-control study to provide more information about the links between vehicle inspections, vehicle roadworthiness and accidents, to inform future decisions about the effectiveness of these inspections."

Click here to read the ATA's full submission.