An old bugbear relegated to a back-burner position because of Covid-19 has come back to cast its shadow over South Africa’s road transport industry.
In an update to transporters who attended the annual convention of the Road Freight Association (RFA) over the weekend, the association’s executive manager for certification and operations, Kevin van der Merwe, said transporting ISO containers on the back of a truck in excess of 4.3 metres was a contravention of regulation 224(b) of the National Road Traffic Act (NRTA).
The contentious promulgation, gazetted in 2012 and requiring the height of laden containers on local roads to be reduced from the current 4.6 metres to 4.3, caused such an outcry from industry it led to an initial moratorium that lasted until January 2019.
Further opposition to the cost ramifications of adapting truck fleets to transport high-cube containers on local roads to comply with the regulation, led to another year’s grace that expired on New Year’s Day 2020.
Thankfully authorities didn’t start pulling trucks off the road and prosecuting transporters for breaking a law that came into effect on January 2 last year – at least not as far as the RFA is aware.
What they did do, Van der Merwe said, was establish a task team “with the idea being that there would be an investigation and some research done to ascertain whether or not it was desirable, safe, and practical to increase the height limit”.
In other words allowing transporters to continue carrying containers at a height of around 4.6 metres.
Unfortunately, any hopes that the task team would resolve a long-standing source of worry and frustration for hauliers and the Department of Transport (DoT) were dashed by the coronavirus.
Since last year’s lockdown, Van der Merwe said, nothing had really happened.
Efforts to look into this matter - and the feasibility of coastal shipping as an option for domestic container freight – had also come to naught as the cost of exploring such an exercise had been vastly underestimated, he added.
As a result, the research never happened and the task team didn’t meet again.
Requests by the RFA for the DoT to react to interventions in the interim also didn’t result in much, if anything at all.
That was until recently.
Said Van der Merwe: “Only last week did the DoT indicate that they were interested in the task team resuming its activities to put this matter to bed.”
Perhaps the most important issue for hauliers to consider, he emphasised, was the possibility of being exposed to insurance repudiation in the event of an incident.
Transporters who have adapted their fleets – and it should be noted that some have – of course don’t have anything to worry about.
Those who haven’t, had their fears assuaged when a deputy director general (DDG) at the DoT circulated a letter telling transporters “not to worry, you can carry on transporting above 4.3 metres”, Van der Merwe said.
He warned though that it was tantamount to giving transporters a false sense of security.
“The problem is that the DDG is not the minister. Only the minister can suspend the effect of a regulation and the only way to do that is in the Government Gazette.”
Long story short, “the high-cube issue has not been resolved”, Van der Merwe said.
In the words of another Kevin, late freight stalwart Kevin Martin, who regularly rained ire down on the DoT for what many transporters still feel is an ill-fated regulation: “We’re kicking the can further down the road.”
Should the issue drag on into 2022, it would be ten years since local transporters woke up to the news that carrying globally standardised containers could become a costly headache for South Africa’s road freight sector.
“It’s a matter of concern,” Van der Merwe told delegates at the RFA Convention.
“Hopefully we will now get some reaction, given the reactivation of the task team on high-cube containers.”
Take the poll below:
