Performance Based Standards in Australia Under the National Heavy Vehicle Law (NHVL)

Abstract

The freight task in Australia in 2020 is expected to be double of what it was in 2006. The community will not accept the doubling of the heavy vehicle fleet to meet such demand. To cope with the increase in demand, Australian supply chains must be on par with the World’s best practices in terms of productivity, safety, and environmental performance. Performance-Based Standards (PBS) is an alternate heavy vehicle design scheme which aims to maximise the safe use of higher productivity vehicles.

PBS vehicles are assessed against 16 safety and four infrastructure standards that are nationally agreed upon. By classifying PBS vehicles into 4 performance levels based on these standards, with PBS Level 1 being the best and PBS Level 4 being the worst, vehicles can gain access to road networks depending on how the vehicles perform rather than what the vehicle looks like. This allows optimised vehicles access to roads previously inaccessible under the Heavy Vehicle National Law’s (HVNL) prescriptive scheme. The decisions made around road access by the road manager is critical to ensuring that PBS vehicles have the access required to deliver the additional safety and productivity benefits that the PBS Scheme offers.

This presentation is an overview of the PBS Scheme aimed to educate road managers on what a PBS vehicle is and how they differentiate from prescriptive heavy vehicles. The focus is of the presentation is around the critical PBS safety and infrastructure standards that will be of interest to the road managers when performing a route assessment or giving road network access to PBS vehicles.