I’d like to take this opportunity to discuss an exciting project we have under way. The Commercial Vehicle Safety Programme (CVSP) is gathering momentum and has reached an exciting stage where we are starting to see the power the programme has to level the playing field for the freight sector.
One of the key aims of the CVSP is to enable Waka Kotahi to regulate at scale. This starts to provide a system where transport operators will be more evenly assessed against regulatory requirements and where it will become more difficult to avoid doing the right thing.
Industry leaders have been asking us for this for many years and finally we’re going to increasingly be in a position to deliver.
Obligations like vehicle registration, certificate of fitness, vehicle weight, permit requirements and RUC payment will all be monitored automatically when a heavy vehicle passes a point at 90km/h, without the need to intercept vehicles that are fully compliant.
Paengaroa and Glasnevin Commercial Vehicle Safety Centres are already operating, and a third, at Rakaia in South Canterbury, will open early next year.
Work is also under way building a site at Ohakea and a tender for a site at Mackays Crossing (Kāpiti) has been awarded. Plans for some other sites are well advanced.
When completed, there will be 12 CVSC sites across the country that will monitor 10 million truck trips and cover 46% of heavy vehicle kilometres travelled each year in New Zealand.
It’s planned the CVSP will then expand further, with the development of 22 regional sites taking coverage to 76% of all heavy vehicle kilometres travelled.
From the middle of next year, data collected by high-speed weigh-in motion sensors built into the road at Safety Centres will be used for invoicing for unpaid RUC.
The sensors work in tandem with roadside cameras that capture vehicles’ number plates. This data is collected 24/7 and can be used to identify and support invoicing operators who underpay RUC.
We’re ensuring our weigh-in-motion data is accurate and to that end:
- We’re proposing to insert two weigh-in-motion scales in the road at each Safety Centre to improve our assurance over the level of accuracy being achieved.
- Our data models and assumptions are being reviewed by an expert third-party.
- We’re comparing trips captured in RUC audits of operators with weigh-in-motion data to give us confidence we can trust it.
- We’re undertaking ongoing calibration through continual comparison of weigh-in-motion data and the CVSC weighbridge measurements.
Given the significant shift in how we invoice, we’re planning to go live with manually created invoices in the middle of next year and, pending further funding being available, will then move towards automatic invoices.
Once the process is fully operational, we’ll be able to regulate RUC payments more comprehensively, with far less manual input, and ensure there is greater RUC compliance among heavy vehicle operators.
I’ve been pleased with the reaction of key industry figures to news of this transformative process for capturing data from heavy vehicles. They’ve quickly grasped that we’ll be levelling the playing field for industry by better targeting non-compliant operators, those whose trucks are consistently non-complaint overloaded.
Using information gathered at Paengaroa and Glasnevin, we anticipate that when all 12 Safety Centres that make up the CVSP are operating, we’ll increase the RUC revenue we collect by about $10 million a year, money that goes straight into the Land Transport Fund to build and maintain roads and roading infrastructure.
If our more comprehensive new method of identifying RUC non-compliance brings to light some recidivist offenders, there are further regulatory steps we may take, including undertaking RUC audits or reviewing an operator’s transport service licence.
We expect once our RUC assessment capacity improves with this new process, there’ll be an increase in RUC compliance.
A more level playing field for industry, better RUC compliance, more money into the Land Transport Fund – these are goals we’ve been aiming at for some time, so it’s exciting for us to be making such tangible progress now with the Commercial Vehicle Safety Programme and our revenue compliance team.
*Brett Aldridge is road safety regulations national manager at Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency.
