Improving heavy vehicle safety and road transport efficiency: a Performance-Based Standards approach in South Africa

Abstract

part of a performance-based standards (PBS) research programme for heavy vehicles in South Africa, a need
 was identified to design and operate a number of PBS demonstration vehicles in a pilot project. The purpose of
 the project is to gain practical experience in the PBS approach and to quantify and evaluate the potential
 infrastructure preservation, safety and productivity benefits for road freight transport. To date, 450 permits for
 PBS demonstration vehicles (including 200 car-carriers) have been issued. The pilot project reached the minimum
 target of 100 million PBS vehicle kilometres in June 2017. The project has shown significant improvements with
 a reduction in the crash rate of 39% compared with the baseline fleet. Significant financial savings have also been
 recorded with a weighted average reduction in trips of 28% and an average reduction of 12.2% in fuel consumption
 and CO2 emissions. The project has thus far shown the possibility to improve heavy vehicle safety and decrease
 road freight transport costs by several percentage points. This paper provides an overview of the PBS pilot project
 including measured benefits based on the monitoring data.

Original document

The different versions of the original document can be found in:

• https://zenodo.org/record/1485028 under the license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode

• https://zenodo.org/record/1485028,

http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1485027 under the license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode

• https://zenodo.org/record/1485028,

http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1485028 under the license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode

DOIS: 10.5281/zenodo.1485028 10.5281/zenodo.1485027