Industry Issues

An Indirect Congestion Effect

Living with the alt rebound effect could create an indirect congestion effect that could result in lower productivity, explained Hadi Ghaderi, Professor of Logistics and Supply Chain Management at Swinburne Business School at the Victorian Transport Association’s Alternative Fuel Summit.

Leaving aside the increasing electric truck ownership, there already are a lot of bottlenecks in the transport network. Even with the introduction of light electric vehicles, it will put additional pressure on the country’s road network, which will have an indirect effect on the supply chain productivity. This could potentially result in higher supply chain costs.

The development of zero emission trucking could also change dynamics around competition between different transport modes. Globally, shippers are trying to reduce their environmental footprint and the introduction of low and zero emission heavy vehicles is likely to diminish the environmental advantage currently held by rail in the intermodal market.

“We have a number of opportunities and challenges ahead of us,” said Hadi.

“A lot of areas that we simply don’t know where it will go. There are four areas I’ve identified. The first is infrastructure readiness, with the uptake of zero emission vehicles. Do we have charging and refuelling infrastructure in place?

Image: Prime Creative Media

“It’s a simple symbiosis problem here. We buy a hydrogen truck and need to buy the hydrogen, but we need hydrogen refuelling infrastructure before we commit to buying the truck.

“We also have challenges in terms of infrastructure capability, axle load, especially in regional areas. There is an opportunity to change the way we design and develop our road user charging in the future and we could take this opportunity to move towards more productivity based charging to encourage efficiency and sustainability.

“If we can encourage operators to have higher utilisation and a more optimised network, leading to better truck utilisation and improved collaboration between operators, there is a unique opportunity that could be seized here. We also see programs like the IAP and TMA.

“They are the first steps to capturing data, understanding origin and destination, understanding how the freight is moving. It’s a great opportunity for us to design more sustainable road user charge pricing.

“The third aspect is the fact that it’s important that we shift our focus from tailpipe emissions to more of a lifecycle perspective. We know that hydrogen vehicles and battery electric have zero tailpipe emissions, but are they cleaner and greener when we look at them from an end to end point of view? One thing that we don’t want is for vehicles to arrive too prematurely without a zero emission supply chain and infrastructure.”

Given the initial investment costs, these capital costs will impact on the market structure. We need to understand the implications of a large uptake of low and zero emission vehicles in the light to medium truck market. We also need to know what government incentives will be for them and how this will actually contribute to addressing the net zero target.

 

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