Transport department to ensure stronger regulation, shift from road to rail transport

Inadequate economic regulation of transport led to knock-on effects and system imbalances such as traffic congestion, higher fuel consumption, carbon emissions and infrastructure damage.  

This is according to the minister of transport Sindisiwe Chikunga. She said the inadequate regulation could also lead to criminal acts such as the recent torching of trucks.  

Chikunga addressed the opening plenary session of the 41st Southern African Transport Conference (SATC) on Monday at CSIR International Conference Centre in Tshwane, under the theme “Rethinking transportation: Planning and building resilient systems to meet global externalities”.  

She said more scientifically rooted regulation would help build a resilient South African transportation system that could navigate climate disasters, major accidents and incidents such as the recent torching of trucks on major highways.  

Referencing the conference theme, Chikunga said for transport systems to be more resilient, the price of transportation must reflect all its social costs. 

Chikunga said the economic regulation of transport bill now before parliament was designed to address the problem of “externalities” that are not regulated in a coherent, centralised manner.

The single transport economic regulator (STER) envisaged in the bill would help ensure an efficient, cost-effective transport system, which could meet the country’s economic and social goals. 

Chikunga said economic regulation in transport was fragmented and inconsistent, and the new regulatory framework aimed to improve this situation. 

She said countries across the world faced similar challenges, such as climate change, globalisation, new technology and workforce resource issues. They needed to build resilience to manage these challenges. 

Using the example of an overloaded truck, she explained how the costs of flouting overloading regulations were not borne by the transport operator but by broader society. 

“The overloaded truck damages the road surface, and risks people’s lives,” she said. “If there is an accident, traffic congestion results, which has economic impacts, forcing hundreds of vehicles to absorb slower arrival times, to consume more fuel and to generate greater carbon emissions,” she added.  

She said that though these incidents happened on roads that were important economic arteries, their costs were not covered in transportation prices, nor were these externalities captured when calculating GDP.

She added it was necessary to update regulations to consider the massive environmental impact of South Africa’s transport sector. She said the country had about 13-million vehicles on the road and that road transport generated 95.7% of all transport emissions of greenhouse gases. 

“We must have uniform methodologies in measuring emissions and carrying out environmental impact assessments of transport infrastructure development.”

Chikunga said as part of this, the department was committed to ensuring adequate environmental audit infrastructure and to supporting a substantial shift from road to rail transport.  

She said a single transport economic regulator would help regulate these processes. She appealed to all SATC delegates to embrace the conference theme of rethinking transport. 

Trucking and freight expert Paul Nordengen, director of Heavy Vehicle Transport Technology Africa and vice-president of the International Forum for Road Transport Technology, lambasted attacks on trucks.  

He said the attacks were criminal acts that left a trail of negative impacts on trucking and freight transport.  

“I think we don’t realise [the severity], so the first thing we think of is the trucks that are being burnt, the damage to the trucks, the damage to the cargo — there is also probably damage to the road infrastructure,” he said.

He said the truck drivers were going through hell, and the traffic bore the additional impact.  

“The [attacks] mainly occur on the main corridors, like Saturday night was on the N3, last night it was the N4 and those corridors are used by trucks 24/7.

“The operators are planning for the commodities, the goods to be delivered at a specific time. Often they have a window and there are penalties if they fall out of that window.

“It has a huge impact on the freight, never mind the other users, but it is the safety of the truck drivers,” he said.  

He added it was unacceptable that truck drivers often drove at night not knowing what would happen to them.  

“It has a big impact on the economy but also on the safety of human beings,” he said.  

Nordengen added the impact was probably bigger on the small businesses which only have a few trucks in their fleet and rely on them delivering and earning their income.  

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