Accurate info on road freight volumes essential for the province

With Gauteng the only major industrial centre in the world not situated on a waterway, its dependence on road transport makes it extremely important to measure road freight volumes. But according to Vincent Parker, senior statistician at Statistics South Africa, this does not happen. South Africa contributes 0.4% of the global GDP, with the volume of land freight transport in South Africa being about 2.2% of the global total. Parker says for this reason the information on the cost of transport and the cost per unit remains essential not only to understand but to manage the economy. “The Department of Transport needs data on volumes in order to plan and maintain the road network,” he says. “None of the data sources available in South Africa however record freight volumes in tonne-kilometres, therefore means to estimate volumes in tonne-kilometres from the available parameters need to be sought.” Parker said while the CSIR annually published an estimate of the road freight volumes, the country had no official statistics available on road freight volumes. “That is because the estimates are not regarded as official and the main obstacle to declaring them official is that the estimates have no measures of variance for the likes of confidence intervals or relative standard errors.” Only once the measure of variance is determined will the country be able to produce an official road freight volume measurement, a necessity to a province such as Gauteng where nearly everything is brought in via road.