The Transport Agency recently released results for the second quarter of the 2013/14 financial year, reporting against the agency’s five strategic priorities.
The five priorities for 2013 to 2016 are aimed at helping the Transport Agency achieve its long term goals and create transport solutions for a thriving New Zealand.
The ‘moving more freight on fewer trucks’ priority is part of broader programme of work underway by the Transport Agency to ‘improve freight supply chain efficiency’ (Objective 3 in our Statement of Intent). Achieving the target for this priority will see us making significant progress towards our long term goal of integrating One Network for Customers (Goal 1 in our Statement of Intent).
In the last quarter our performance indicator ‘H-Miles’ has increased to 14.8% (H-Miles being high productivity motor vehicle (HPMV) mileage as a percentage of total heavy vehicle kilometres travelled). The increase in HPMV travel, including 50MAX, was within a context of increasing road freight travel as a result of the improving economic conditions.
To put that into context this increase represents an extra 20 million kilometres in HPMV travel over the previous quarter. Using HPMVs instead of regular heavy trucks will improve productivity by between 14-20%. Our analysis suggests that the productivity benefits from this reduced truck travel, to deliver the same amount of freight, are worth about $16 million. In some areas HPMVs have been used to absorb the growing freight task, so fewer additional trucks were required. Along with the commercial savings there are also flow-on economic benefits to exporters and consumers, the safety benefits from the reduced crash risk that fewer truck trips provide, and from older trucks being replaced by new HPMVs that have more advanced safety features.
