The 2020 New Zealand Trucking Association Industry Summit took place on Saturday 21 November at Riccarton Racecourse, Christchurch.

Riccardo Areosa, NZTA’s manager of permitting, discussed what the agency was doing around permitting. He said that nearly 50% of all combinations in use were nine-axle vehicles running 50MAX – and there was a steady increase of applications. Mostly, these nine-axles proformas had more than one permit, including 50MAX, 54 tonne and 58 tonne. He said there had also been an increase in 54- and 58-tonne permitting.

Aroeosa said the first initiative undertaken by the NZTA was increasing the warnings of permit breaches and compliance issues. “Working with compliance teams, we’ve seen that to be working quite well. With the Weigh Right programme, we expect these figures to go up significantly,” he said. According to Areosa’s figures, warnings are trending downward since the introduction of Critical Breach monitoring.

A key initiative was to make 50MAX data available for GIS consumption through the agency’s data portal, Areosa said. “The data is now available for the likes of Teletrac Navman and Eroad to start mapping the 50MAX routes.”

A third ‘continuous work improvement’ initiative was the release of the HPMV full network to get a framework of state highways open to 58-tonners. “We’re trying to work with some local councils so we can make the freight connections more seamless. We understand that with regional permitting, it’s very complicated, and we’re trying to make that simpler. This is one of our first steps,” Riccardo Areosa. 50MAX he said.

Another initiative the agency was working on with its vehicle-standards team was to simplify registrations and permitting. “We found a chicken-and-egg scenario. We are trying to make that more seamless by empowering heavy-vehicle engineers and certifiers to have that conversation based on the proforma diagrams produced. So when a vehicle is manufactured, it can go to the testing site and get a number plate and get registered and into the permitting system seamlessly.”

Areosa said that as the agency progressed with its new permitting tool (out for tender at the moment) during the next couple of years, the process would become seamless with no delays for operators.

Finally, Areosa commented on the TERNZ assessment tool used to assess all the performers against performance-based standards. “We had a refresh of proformas at the beginning of last year with the release of B-train and logging combinations. Now we’re looking at truck and trailers, and six more combinations are coming around mid-next year.”