In most countries the heavy goods vehicles are those freight vehicles with a gross mass greater than either 3.5 t or 4.5 t. The maximum allowed weights and dimensions of road freight vehicles are regulated and vary in each country. High Capacity Vehicles (HCVs) are vehicles that exceed the general weight and dimension limitations in the country and are usually operated in limited geographical areas or on specific routes in the country under a special regime. Therefore, a 5-axle vehicle that is 22m long with the mass of 44 tons could be considered a HCV in one country, but would fall into the general freight vehicles category in another country.
The distinguishing characteristic of HCVs from the business perspective is that they are able to transport a larger weight or/and volume of cargo in one trip than a conventional freight vehicle would. This leads to a range of implications for the transport operators, shippers of the goods, regulators and the society.
Current status
A number of countries, including Australia, Canada, United States, Mexico, Argentina, New Zealand, South Africa and several countries in Europe have introduced the HCVs either for permanent use or as a pilot to investigate the impacts that the use of larger and heavier vehicles would have.
In European Union the European Modular System (EMS) is not strictly regulated and is included in the EU directive 96/53/EC of 25 July 1996. The use of these vehicles is allowed “according to a modular concept”, but it does not state that this modular concept should not exceed 25.25m length, nor does it limit the maximum weight to 60 tonnes, which are the dimensions and weights typically used by EMS vehicles. Those limitations are imposed by the individual member countries in specific applications and can be exceeded by the countries. The advantage of EMS is that it gives high flexibility to adapt vehicles to different situations and allows using longer combinations when possible, and shorter when local conditions or costumers require so, see Figure 1.
Figure 1 – European Modular System
Source: (Serena, 2016)
Historically larger vehicles were used in Finland and Sweden since the 1980s, and as these countries joined the European Union in 1995, EMS was developed as a compromise to keep the larger vehicles in these countries, but using the standardised EU modules. Since 2011 EMS is also permitted in the Netherlands, after testing since 2011. Trials for using EMS have also been conducted in Denmark (since 2008), Germany (in some federal states since 2012) and in Flanders region of Belgium since 2013.
Drivers for adoption
As with any other innovation, a range of drivers contribute to the adoption of HCVs by the transport companies in their operations. According to (Aronietis et al., 2016) there can be three types of drivers that ensure the success of innovation activities: operational, market and regulatory.
The first driver type are the operational drivers with technology push and cost saving. The technology push is the availability of the technology from the manufacturers, in this case the availability of the vehicle combinations. The cost saving driver are the fuel and labor costs which could be reduced per unit of transported cargo by using high capacity vehicles.
The second type is the market drivers. The market demands higher performance of road freight operators at lower costs. The increase of vehicle size and weight can help improving on those performance characteristics.
The third type is the regulatory drivers, which are the regulations that governments apply for achieving certain policy goals. In road transport the important policy goals are the reduction of road traffic accidents, improving of environmental performance of road transport and efficiency of transport operations.
For the HCVs, the presence of drivers in all the three categories is an indication of high likelihood of success of this innovation. It must be taken into account that in some case there could be a lack of some of those mentioned drivers, e.g. lack of regulatory drivers, making the implementation impossible.
Impacts
The use of HCVs is associated with environmental and safety impacts, as well as the economic impacts on the transport markets that relate to the increases of competitiveness of road freight transport. It is worth reviewing these impacts.
Environmental impacts
The pollution and global warming has become even a greater issue on political agenda lately. Local emissions, like NOX, PM, HC and CO, particularly from diesel vehicles, have impact on the air quality locally, especially in the cities. The poor air quality is to blame for various health problems that include cardiovascular and respiratory diseases such as irregular heartbeat, heart attacks, asthma, bronchitis, emphysema, and cancer.
The emissions of vehicles are on the political agenda at all levels despite the improvements that the introduction of EURO emission and safety classes of vehicles have brought. Unfortunately, further technological progress in the field of reducing of harmful local emissions from road freight vehicles is technologically difficult and in the foreseeable future further reduction of local emissions from diesel vehicles with creation of EURO VII emission class is not expected.
In the future emerging technologies that use alternative fuel sources, e.g. electrical power supply from the infrastructure, could help tackle both, the local pollution levels and greenhouse gas emissions.
Safety impacts
The reported accident rates in all countries are lower for HCVs than conventional vehicles, but one should not rush with conclusions that the safer operation is due to the characteristics of the vehicles alone, as there seem to be several reasons affecting vehicle safety.
The certified high capacity vehicles are often equipped with additional safety systems, which conventional vehicles do not have. These technological improvements could lead to lower accident count and lower severity of the accidents.
Also, additional enforcement and monitoring equipment is sometimes required to be installed on board. This leads to high capacity vehicles having higher compliance rates with the existing regulations and ensure safer everyday operation.
HCVs tend to be more expensive than regular vehicles and the companies that start using them tend to assign their best drivers, those with best performance, to those vehicles. In some cases the drivers of HCVs are required to follow additional training to obtain qualification to drive these vehicles.
In most cases the road networks that HCVs are allowed to use are limited to specific geographical areas or specific limited routes. Therefore the road networks that HCVs use are not the same that conventional road freight vehicles use and they could even be adapted specifically for HCVs. If HCVs are limited to “safer” roads outside rural areas with less traffic, fewer possibilities of interactions with other road users are possible. It means that the statistics that were cited above are not always comparable with those of the conventional trucks.
The higher efficiency of HCVs means that the same amount of transportation can be performed with a lower number of vehicle kilometres. This reduces the exposure and inevitably the absolute number of accidents, which is a benefit to the society.
The contributing factors to safety of HCVs are a developed regulatory framework that is backed up with proper enforcement. Existing ITS technology has been used for enforcement successfully. Driver training and infrastructure design that is adapted to the requirements of HCVs is important as well.
Economic impacts
Using these HCVs in practical operations involves the challenge is to optimize the use of loading capacity in transport operations so that the largest amount of cargo could be transported. In practice, depending on the cargo type the loading capacity of the vehicle will be limited either by the weight of the transported freight, or by the volume of it. Therefore the increase of weight limits with HCVs will mostly have an impact on the transport of types of cargo that are weight limited, like steal. Similarly, the increase in the maximum allowed dimensions of the vehicle will mostly impact the cargo types that are volumetrically limited.
With increased vehicle size the main benefits for the haulier include: more efficient use of the vehicle (with lower amortisation per unit of cargo), reduction of fuel consumption per unit of transported cargo and reduction labour expenses per unit of cargo. This also has a positive externality of lower pollution and greenhouse gas emissions associated with the transportation of the cargo.
The impacts of introduction of HCVs will differ depending on implementation case, the geographical environment, the operational pattern of the company, the type and density of the cargo, and other factors. The main result in most cases will be the increased efficiency of operations per unit of transported cargo.
By improving the asset and labour utilisation and energy efficiency of road freight transport can improve its competitiveness, making it difficult for alternative, lower-carbon modes to increase their share of the freight market. The labour, capital and fuel costs are the three major cost components of road hauliers, see Figure 2, and the use of HCVs is a way for reducing those and improving the road transport cost efficiency.
Figure 2 – Road haulier cost structure in European countries, min-max range in %
Data source: (Panteia, 2018) for Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden.
The mode shift impacts that the increases of road transport efficiency and consequent cost reductions bring seem to have been overestimated in the prior research, (de Jong, 2017). Different mode choice is only one possible reaction to price change. Other possible reactions of the shippers include changes in: fuel efficiency, transport efficiency (depot locations, shipment size, consolidation, empty driving), transport demand (different suppliers or customers, production location) and different commodity demand. In an example from Sweden it has been shown that increases in road tonne-kilometres are mainly driven by other factors than increased road transport efficiency due to use of HCVs, (Vierth, 2017).
Potential outlook
The benefits from operation of HCVs are clear, but their use is impossible without regulatory accommodation by relaxing existing vehicle size and weight limitations. In order to proceed with adopting legislation that permits this increase, a number of conditions can be advantageous. In addition to support from the road transport industry itself, it is helpful if there is support from the society as a whole. The role of an opinion leader/influencer in gaining this support cannot be underestimated.
Often the lobby of competing modes of transport can play a significant role in counteracting these efforts with the aim of restricting the efficiency increases of the road transport. A good example of this is the “No Mega Trucks Campaign” sponsored by the rail lobby, (No Mega Trucks Campaign, 2017).
Stringent enforcement thanks to technological developments, like use of GPS tracking systems and automated weighing and vehicle measuring technologies, can help overcoming the obstacles. They can reliably ensure that the weight and dimension limitations are not exceeded, and that the vehicles are staying within the designated geographical areas where their operation is allowed. The operations can also be limited to specific stretches of roads that are suitable particularly for HCV operation.
Suitability of the road infrastructure must be evaluated when designing the rules allowing HCV operation. Infrastructure characteristics, e.g. radius of the roundabouts or maximum load capacity of the bridges that need to be crossed, can be a limiting factor. Therefore often it may be wiser to limit the implementation areas to specific routes or geographical areas where niche transport markets would benefit from efficiency increases to bring higher value to the society.
References
Aronietis, R. et al. (2016) ‘Forecasting port-level demand for LNG as a ship fuel: the case of the port of Antwerp’, Journal of Shipping and Trade, 1(1). doi: 10.1186/s41072-016-0007-1.
de Jong, G. (2017) ‘Research on the Estimation of Price Elasticities in Freight Transport’. Workshop on Road Freight Efficiency versus Freight Modal Split, Cambridge, 7 December.
No Mega Trucks Campaign (2017) No Mega Trucks Campaign ~ No mega trucks in Europe! Available at: http://www.nomegatrucks.eu/ (Accessed: 25 October 2017).
Panteia (2018) Cost comparison and cost developments in the European road haulage sector: Reference date 1-1-2018. Zoetermeer, Netherlands.
Serena, R. (2016) ‘Los Megacamiones, una realidad en España’, Logística, MUGIE 2015-2016, grupo A, 5 February. Available at: https://logisticaicex.wordpress.com/2016/02/05/los-megacamiones-una-realidad-en-espana/ (Accessed: 3 July 2018).
Vierth, I. (2017) ‘Research on Modal Split in Sweden’. Workshop on Road Freight Efficiency versus Freight Modal Split, Cambridge, 7 December.
Woodrooffe, J. (2017) ‘Assessing high capacity vehicles’. ITF 2017 Summit. High Capacity Transport: Technologies for tailored network access, Leipzig, 31 May. Available at: https://2017.itf-oecd.org/high-capacity-transport.