Does policy paralysis pay?

The road freight industry has “growed like Topsy” and is now out of control. Nick PORÉE explains why.

The National Transport Policy Study (NTPS) in 1985 finally broke the shackles on the road freight industry, which subsequently mushroomed into the most significant mode of land transport within about 10 years. At the time, the Department of Transport (DoT) had the intention of creating the Road Transport Quality System (RTQS), which would manage the rapid expansion of commercial road freight transport and ensure the control of operational quality. The DoT commissioned Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) to develop operator training courses and the RTQS system.

The system was designed to conform with the basic principles of commercial transport regulation (in all modes) and included the fundamental requirements of effective regulation:

• Operator registrar and registration system – to ensure that operating trucks on public roads is not a “right” but a “permission” dependent on compliance (this was not done).

• Operator qualification – establishment of an education and qualification system (this was done).

• Responsible Competent Persons (RCP) – to identify responsibility and accountability for operations, similar to the Factories Act (this was not done).

• Competent heavy goods vehicle (HGV) driver training and qualification – instead of unregulated, unprofessional training (this was not done).

• Certificates of Roadworthiness (CORs) inspection system – to control vehicle maintenance quality (this was done with ineffective monitoring).

• Recording and reporting systems – to enable policy development and infrastructure planning (this was not done).

RTQS development was transferred back to the DoT and its consultants, the railway was permitted to interfere, and the trucking industry association became the “expert” advisor. The result was conflation of the RTQS with road traffic regulation, the absence of a registrar, and the dilution and emasculation of most of the RTQS, making “quality control” impossible. The result by 2024 is that the road freight industry has “growed like Topsy” and is now out of control. 

A very brief survey of 4,000 vehicles on the N3 between Durban and Gauteng shows that they are operated by 1,766 different entities. This implies that the 7,000 to 8,000 vehicles per day running on the N3 are operated by over 3,000 different operators. 

On the national level, there are 392,349 heavy trucks and possibly another 100,000 lighter commercials on the road. This implies about 18,000 operators (both hauliers and own account)… and the authorities do not even know who they are, let alone have any records of competence, activities, or operational performance. Applying the proportions on the N3 to the total population indicates that over 80% of operators run one to three trucks. Of the 20 different axle configurations identified in weighbridge statistics, about 29% on the N3 are six-axle articulated combinations and 60% are seven-axle interlink combinations, with curtain side, flatdeck, and tippers being the major load configurations.

There are also some very evident changes in the composition of the trucking fleet, as shown in the table below. In the period 2018 to 2023 the heavy goods vehicle (HGV) fleet has grown by 4% to 342,349 vehicles; likewise lighter commercial vehicles have grown by 3.9%. The heavy trailer fleet, however, has grown by 96% (115,038 units), which indicates a significant switch from rigid to articulated heavy vehicles. 

The large increase in heavy trailer registrations has changed the trailer-to-truck ratio from 0.3:1 to 0.6:1. This step-up in capacity is almost certainly due to the large increase in long-haul volumes as a result of the railway failure. It would be useful to analyse this, if there were a seriously effective national freight monitoring system as envisaged in RTQS; however, this is not possible, as the StatsSA data is produced from a very limited sample and the Electronic National Administration Traffic Information System (eNATIS) does not include operational data.

Policy paralysis obviously pays, as it is likely that many of the lower order entities operate “below the radar” to avoid taxes, do not do vehicle maintenance, “acquire” their CORs like the minibus taxis, and employ what drivers they can find. It isn’t surprising that compliant operators find the playing field uneven and many of the bigger ones have turned to performance-based standards (PBS) instead of National Road Traffic Act (NRTA) vehicles to give payloads of 39 to 44 tonnes and operate profitably, clear of the opposition.

A negative externality of the situation is the increasing prevalence of badly maintained vehicles (the COR system does not work), with over 60% of HGVs found to be defective in roadside testing campaigns. The proportion of HGV accidents is also rising, but the national accident reporting system of the Road Traffic Management Corporation (RTMC) is dependent on defective systems and incomplete information from the South African Police Services (SAPS) and provincial traffic authorities, so that reliable data is only really available from the toll road concession companies and some metros (e.g. Durban and Cape Town). 

From 2020 to 2024, heavy vehicle traffic has increased by 51% on the N11 (Majuba) and by 89% on the N2 at Mtubatuba. The road condition on the major haulage routes to ports in the Free State and KwaZulu-Natal is deteriorating rapidly and recovery will be a future drain on the fiscus. Given the current railways situation, Richards Bay is again under siege from the massive influx of tippers, and this is likely to only change very slowly.

The policy inertia in government continues to allow Transnet to fiddle with completely unrealistic “recovery plans” instead of resolving the 50-year monopoly policy backlog by allowing private sector businesses to create a commercially competitive multi-modal port and land transport system, as in most developed countries. The result of the continuing railway monopoly will be further expansion of road haulage, which is already overwhelming the ineffective regulatory and maintenance systems.  

Load control by weighing of vehicles on the N3 amounts to about 0.05% or even less of total traffic and vehicle inspections, with no coordinated monitoring of operator performance for either activity. The N3 at Harrismith is a total jungle of HGV traffic by night, and the inefficiency and congestion on the route is aggravating the lack of port capacity and making South Africa uncompetitive as an import-export corridor to the interior. 

After 20 years as a freight transport consultant, explaining this all to the DOT committees in a number of policy studies (e.g. the National Transport Master Plan, National Freight Logistics Strategy, and Road Freight Strategy) there has been no change. Now that all modes are to be controlled by the DoT, we can only hope that our new minister will make a “new broom” restructuring decision to catch up the years of bad policy decisions in ports, road, and rail to create a commercially viable and sustainable logistics system for future growth.