Adapting South Africa’s trailer fleet to meet government’s high cube container height restriction would demand that every single dock leveller and loading bay in the country be rebuilt.
According to Mike Walwyn of Nexlog Supply Chain Management, the cost involved in achieving this is conservatively being estimated at anywhere between R5-R8 million. “The second consideration is the time it would take to get new dock levellers and to change loading bays between now and December.
It would take a lot longer to achieve this than six months,” he said. Speaking at the Road Freight Association (RFA) conference held in the Western Cape recently, Walwyn said there were countries around the world that adhered to the 4.3m restriction for the movement of their containers, but South Africa could not be compared to them due to its lack of infrastructure.
“Yes, it is true that there are other jurisdictions in the world like the USA that have some lower criteria. That is fine up to a point, but in our case, we don’t have a rail system that is efficient enough to accommodate these containers – and even if we did, the first and last mile would always be on road. So every single high cube container in this country moves by road at some point.”
Walwyn said considering that South Africa’s fruit industry exclusively used high cube containers for export it was essential to find a solution to this issue.
“If South Africa pushes ahead with a deadline of January 1, 2019 and insists that all containers transported on the back of a truck do not exceed a height of 4.3m there will be an immediate disaster as all of this country’s grape and deciduous fruit exports will come to an immediate stop,” he said. “More than 100 000 containers of fruit are exported out of the Port of Cape Town alone and they are all 12m long containers.”
He said all of the fruit industry in the Western Cape’s pack houses, warehouses and other infrastructure were designed for a height of 4.6m. Not only were there not enough trailers available to service this industry but lower trailers would not be able to pack as the dock levellers and loading bays would not be able to accommodate them, he added.
“And all of this is going to happen at the height of our grape and deciduous fruit season.”
