Coal transport by road here to stay, summit told
FLEXIBILITY FOR INNOVATION A fit-for-purpose regulatory environment will allow for flexibility to encourage innovation in vehicle design
ETIYEI CHIBIRA With coal volumes moved by road gradually increasing, an efficient road transportation system is required to better support the bulk commodity haulage industry
Trucks were here to stay and the sooner all industry stakeholders embraced their presence, the better it would be for society as a whole – this was not limited to the coal industry, but included all bulk commodity transporting sectors, asserted Cross Border Road Transport Agency (C-BRTA) research division senior manager Etiyei Chibira.
Chibira was addressing black-owned training and conferencing company Intelligence Transfer Centre’s second yearly Coal Transportation Africa summit, held in Johannesburg, in May.
He said that coal volumes moved by road were gradually increasing and, given the significant role that road haulage played in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, particularly in the coal sector, there needed to be an efficient road transport system to better support the bulk commodity haulage industry.
“Road transport facilitates the physical transportation of coal along the industry value chain, connects inland coalfields to production nodes and is responsible for linking remotely located coalfields to railway networks in many instances.”
He stated that road transport in many instances, provided a faster alternative to transport by rail, which was particularly important in cases where coal supplies were urgently needed by power stations to ensure electricity generation was not interrupted.
Further, Chibira pointed out that road haulage was becoming increasingly popular in not only the coal sector but also the freight sector throughout the SADC region, owing to the flexibility of routes and the varying nature of volumes, as well as the lower capital investment required, compared to rail.
However, Chibira acknowledged that the road transport sector in the SADC region faced significant challenges.
These included a lack of capacity on the road networks, which restricted axle loads, primarily owing to the road design geometry; generally poor road conditions, owing to a lack of maintenance and underinvestment in road infrastructure; and a lack of connecting points to other infrastructure in road networks, which increased travel times and vehicle-capacity limitations.
Chibira also highlighted that transport operators and drivers were guilty at times of excessively overloading vehicles, which resulted in accidents and product spills.
However, he stressed that, in the SADC region, road-transport regulations were “excessively restrictive”, which limited the flexibility of transport operators to improve operational efficiencies in terms of the volumes they could transport and thereby improve their revenues.
Further, many border crossings between SADC countries used “outdated methods” of border control and were “highly inefficient”, which often resulted in bottlenecks on both sides of these crossings, Chibira said.
“These border-crossing delays result in added costs for transport operators, which are ultimately carried by the rest of the supply chain, thereby making materials more expensive for producers and consumers.”
Additionally, Chibira pointed out that several SADC countries had multiple traffic regulatory authorities, owing to certain jurisdictions having their own authorities and mandates to carry out load inspections, often independent of one another. The duplication of processes caused further delays and also added to companies’ operating costs, he added.
“The C-BRTA has recorded many incidents of trucks travelling from Durban, in KwaZulu-Natal, to the South Africa-Zimbabwe border crossing, being stopped more than 30 times by different traffic authorities,” he commented.
Chibira said, in order to support the road transportation sector, particularly the segment responsible for bulk commodity haulage, government and industry had to address several key issues.
These included sustained investment in and maintenance of haulage routes, creating a fit-for-purpose regulatory environment that allowed for flexibility to encourage innovation in vehicle design, and establishing risk-based accreditation schemes for transporters in the coal industry.
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