With no change of mind by the Minster of Transport, and the maximum height of freight vehicles and loads continuing to be limited to the current 4.3-metres, it looks like truckers transporting high-cube containers are going to have to buy whole new trailer fleets to be legal. This is because high-cube containers are 2.896-metres (9-foot 6-inches) tall, in contrast to standard containers, which have a maximum height of 2.591-m (8-ft6-ins). That 305-millimetre difference in the height of the boxes is OK under the Road Traffic Act (RTA) when skeletal chassis trailers are used. They have an industry standard height of 1.4-m, and still only have an overall height of 4.296-m (under that magical 4.3-m) loaded with a high-cube. But most road transporters on the SA roads haul the 1.5-m to 1.60-m flat-deck semitrailers. With a high-cube on top, that gives a gross height of 4.396-m to 4.496-m – way above that permissible gross of 4.3-m. When all this came to a head about three years ago, it delighted the road traffic authorities around the country, with traffic cops gleefully hauling highcube container trucks off the road, impounding them, and slapping fines on the operators. This threatened to put offending operators out of business, and the only answer at the time, truckers told FTW, was for them to refuse to haul the offending loads. But this row over the legality/illegality of transporting high-cube containers very quickly reached ministerial level and minister of transport, Sibusiso Ndebele allowed an unofficial moratorium to be placed on the offending section of legislation – the one that restricts the travel height to 4.3-m for vehicles transporting high-cube containers. But that moratorium isn’t going to last too much longer, and the overall problem has not been nationally cured. At the beginning of this year, Gavin Kelly, technical and operations manager of the Road Freight Association (RFA), had distinct hopes that this issue could soon be up for high level discussion between road transport and freight industry bodies and the DoT. By September, the RFA was hoping to have the high-cube container issue with the Department of Transport (DoT) settled before November, according to Kelly. With the department adamant that it is not going to increase the permissible height, the RFA has been forced to accept that the only answer is for the trucking industry to replace almost all of SA’s presently over-height container fleet. The November dating, Kelly told FTW, was necessary to meet the deadline in the association proposal to the department that ‘all new vehicles registered from July 1, 2011 and intended to be used to transport highcube containers, be so built (designed) as to transport the high cube container within the prescribed maximum height of 4.3-m’. Disappointingly for you readers, this is where the story dies for the time being. November has now faded into the background, it’s close to Christmas holidays for parliament, and Kelly has been unable to tell FTW anything new – indicating that the truckers’ associations can do little until everything wakens up in the New Year of 2011.
