New blueprint will update overloading rules

THE GROUNDWORK has been laid for the creation of a blueprint to establish a fair and equitable set of formulae for overloading tolerances based on current equipment and conditions. At present the permissible gross vehicle mass is 56 tons with a 2% tolerance,allowing for discrepancies in equipment and other factors. But the formulae on which that figure was based date back almost 40 years when the equipment and infrastructure were very different. The Department of Transport has agreed that a review is necessary and will outsource the project to a service provider through its tender system and pay for it. This will provide a starting point based on equipment, vehicles, tyres and infrastructure that exist in 2008,” says RFA technical and operations manager Gavin Kelly. “We have put in some proposals and they are looking at those. “We are very happy with this development,” says Kelly. “It proves to operators that the DoT is not a monolith that won’t listen – we are determining and playing a role in the formulation of legislation which must be seen in a tremendously positive light. “We have committed ourselves to the process and will bind ourselves to the findings of the research.” The overloading issue moved into the spotlight recently when the tolerance was reduced from 5% to 2%. At the time the RFA objected on the grounds that there were circumstances that needed to be taken into account before prosecution. “The RFA does not in any way condone overloading, but climatic conditions, for example, can affect the weight of a load. If you load a vehicle with iron bars in Durban where it’s hot and they expand and you then drive to Gauteng where they contract and become denser, the vehicle will be heavier here than in Durban. “Similarly if you’re carrying maize or coal – when it rains the water makes the load heavier. That’s what the tolerance is there for.” Two years ago the tolerance was dropped from 5 to 2% based on the viewpoint that operators were purposely overloading to 5% to get more payload. “The RFA believes that current formulae are outdated and would like to see a scientific process that determines whether they are valid. “Some were conceived in the 1960s and a review is therefore long overdue.”