Heavy vehicle compliance review of best practices

From April to July 2021, ARRB was engaged by Queensland's Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR) to investigate the best practices for monitoring heavy vehicles across the Queensland road network.

In this fast-paced NACOE project - a research collaboration between TMR and ARRB - the team delved into TMR’s heavy vehicle monitoring practices to identify the gaps in the current methods, as well as the types of data the teams of TMR need to collect, such as vehicle size, speed and classification.

This information was collected through a large TMR stakeholder workshop and an accompanying survey.

Moving outward from Queensland, the review covered the practices of other Australian states, in particular, NSW and Victoria, as well as other countries.

Due to their history and innovation in the heavy vehicle space, Europe and the USA were closely researched, along with New Zealand because of its close location to Australia.

The research so far provided examples of different technology types that the jurisdictions use to monitor and enforce the heavy vehicles compliance, such as infrared-based, video-imaging, multi-sensor and high speed weigh-in-motions, and telematics.

Armed with this knowledge, the project team approached various providers of these technologies for one-on-one consultations to better understand how their technology works and how it could assist TMR.

Using all the findings from the project up to this point, recommendations for improving TMR’s heavy vehicle monitoring methods were drafted. The entirety of the research and the recommendations were written into a report and presented to the leaders of the Heavy Vehicle and Structures teams in TMR.

The project is expected to continue for at least another two years, with research for Year Two expected to start in September 2021.