RFNSW and WRF warn of productivity losses due to rail freight targets
The simmering feud between road and rail freight lobbies has bubbled up again following renewed sniping from the tracks.
The latest outbreak comes as a league of rail and logistics bodies makes a plea for Port Botany container rail subsidies of the kind shown to make Fremantle the leading national example of modal shift.
Freight on Rail Group (FORG) of Australia, Australian Logistics Council (ALC), Freight and Trade Alliance (FTA), the Australasian Railway Association (ARA) and individual port rail freight operators came together on Friday for the call.
Their arguments, noting trucks’ share of Sydney’s road congestion and expanded use of larger trucks, were couched in terms trucking organisations view as an attack on their industry’s efficiency and productivity gains, specifically high productivity vehicles (HPVs).
Read about the call for subsidised rail freight at Port Botany, here
In response, Road Freight NSW (RFNSW) warns the introduction of the Western Australian subsidies policy will lead to an increase in trucking operational costs and a loss of productivity in road freight moving across local supply chains.
RFNSW chief executive Simon O’Hara calls on industry groups to work together with the state government to develop viable solutions to ease congestion off the port, as opposed to setting new targets that ‘unfairly penalised one transport mode to protect the other’.
“We believe that imposing a target percentage on the use of rail freight is a social policy, focused on driving trucks off the road, it’s certainly not an economic policy. And from our perspective, it will cost our local trucking businesses and local jobs,” O’Hara says.
“The [state] government should be looking at long-term solutions that provide a platform that addresses infrastructure and operational constraints and importantly, leads to greater efficiencies and performance and productivity gains across both road and rail modes.
“We can’t have one transport mode, penalised to protect the other.”
Western Roads Federation (WRF) CEO Cam Dumesny shares RFNSW’s concerns, saying that, despite road comprising 80 per cent of movements at the Port of Fremantle, the policy stops road productivity improvements, in order to protect the 20 per cent on rail target.
“We support both road and rail, but we need solutions that foster productivity in both modes,” Dumesny explains.
“This subsidy may be increasing rail targets, but at what cost to road freight?
“That’s the flaw – it continues to penalise and prevent productivity in WA road freight.”