I came across some statistics this week which confirm my suspicions about what’s been going on in 2020, and yes, it’s been a crazy year. This is one we are not going to forget anytime soon and is going to influence our thinking for decades to come.
One of the big effects has been a complete turnaround in the image of the trucking industry. For so many years truckies and trucking have been seen as a menace to society and largely ignored, as long as we kept out of the way and kept our mouths shut.
This turned around 360 degrees earlier this year when, suddenly, the heroes of the pandemic were from the trucking industry, working though the lockdown to enable the consumers of Australia to fight over packs of toilet rolls in the aisles of our supermarkets.
Even a transport worker being the thought to be the source of an outbreak of the virus in South West Sydney wasn’t enough to get trucking offside with the community. However, the gradual return to something like normality has seen tabloid media outlets to revert to type and try to give truckies a kicking.
Anyway, to the stats which cropped up in a chat about telematics. One of the major suppliers of electronic equipment and software in Australia had aggregated some of it anonymised data to take a snapshot of how different 2020 has been when compared to the same period in 2019.
The numbers show some surprising and other, not so surprising, changes taking place. It will be interesting to check these again next year to see if we are really getting back to ‘normal’ or whether the world has changed forever.
The first standout number is that of average trip duration in 2020. It is over 13 per cent lower than last year. Trips are taking a lot less time because there was less traffic on the road in the April to June period.
The trucking industry was under great pressure to deliver the goods and, as a result, there was an increase in over 60 per cent of the number of trips taken each day, by each truck. This increase led to a 70 per cent jump in distance per day per truck, the industry has been pulling out all of the stops to keep the economy rolling.
When a crisis hit Australia, the trucking industry stepped up to the mark and got the job done. We can all give ourselves a pat on the back in the way we have coped with it all, and it’s been a crazy year. This is a testament to genuine resilience (the buzzword for 2020?) on the part of an industry which is largely ignored and regularly vilified in public.
