Clean wheels keep on turning: reducing truck air-pollution in urban areas

Trucks. They deliver essential items – especially in the COVID lockdowns – but most of us want them off our local streets. Whether it’s the pollution or the noise, there are serious side-effects to trucks in urban areas, especially when the ageing fleet isn’t keeping up with the latest technologies. But how to reduce the health and environmental risks of trucks, while maintaining this vital mode of transport?

Join Kat Clay as she interviews Marion Terrill, Program Director, and Ingrid Burfurd, Senior Associate, about the latest Grattan Report, The Grattan truck plan: practical policies for cleaner freight.

Read the report

Transcript

Kat Clay: Trucks, they deliver essential items, especially in the COVID lockdowns, but most of us want them off our local streets. Whether it’s the pollution or the noise, there are serious side effects to trucks in urban areas, especially when the aging fleet isn’t keeping up with the latest technologies. But how to reduce the health and environmental risks of trucks while maintaining this vital mode of transport?

I’m Kat Clay and here to talk about the latest Grattan Report, the Grattan Truck Plan, Practical Policies for Cleaner Freight. I’m Marion Terrell, Program Director, and Ingrid Burford, Senior Associate. Welcome. Hi Kat.

Ingrid Burfurd: Hi Kat.

Kat Clay: Now Marion, there’s a real love hate relationship with trucks here. Can you tell me three things the audience needs to know about trucks that they might not know?

Marion Terrill: Yeah, much as we may love parcels turning up on our doorstep or popping out to the shops for something or other, the trucks that make all of this possible are hard to love. So compared to overseas countries, Australian trucks are very old, very dirty and surprisingly skinny. So, the average age of a truck here is 15 years old.

And if you think about cars, the average age of a car is just 10 years old. They’re also particularly dirty. We’re behind the rest of the world with respect to pollution standards, not to mention carbon emissions. And we have this pointless regulation here, so that trucks have to be 2 percent narrower than the global norm.

And that makes it unnecessarily difficult to import the full international range of trucks with the best pollution reducing and safety technology. So, we think Australian trucks are falling short on health. environment and safety.

Kat Clay: So, before we get too far into the podcast, there is a difference between air pollution and emissions.

And we’re going to talk about both today. So, Ingrid, in the interest of clarity, can you just run us through the difference between these two?

Ingrid Burfurd: Yeah, thank you, Kat. I think it’s very useful to run through this distinction because it is a bit complicated. So, a cocktail of different gases and liquids and tiny solids are pumped out of the exhaust pipes of trucks.

sometimes, particularly if a truck is old, it’s visible as a, as a sooty cloud behind the truck. Some of those emissions have environmental effects. The familiar culprit is the gas carbon dioxide, which is a major contributor to climate change. And the effects of carbon emissions are felt at the global scale.

But there are also plenty of other pollutants in the mix, which are not as well known. I’ll refer to these other pollutants, which have a local effect, as air pollution. Air pollution is important because it has a terrible effect on people’s health. The two pollutants that are the worst offenders are particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide.

Kat Clay: So, I mean, I’m not a scientist, as you can tell, but could you explain a little bit more about this particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide?

Ingrid Burfurd: Yes, technical terms are nobody’s friend. So, the term particulate matter refers to tiny solids. So, for example, tiny, tiny pieces of soot that are left behind after diesel is burned in a truck’s engine.

Particulate matter is measured by its size and as particulates get smaller, they get more dangerous. That’s because the smallest, ultra fine particulates can penetrate the walls of people’s lungs. enter people’s bloodstream, and then travel through their bodies. Nitrogen dioxide is often called NO2, in case you’ve seen that written up somewhere, and it’s also a component of nitrogen oxides, which are frequently referred to as NOx.

Kat Clay: So, Ingrid, I mean, what is the impact of air pollution on Australians health?

Ingrid Burfurd: One of the most important things to take away from this conversation today is that there is no safe level of air pollution, and that even if you can’t see it, it can damage your body. And that’s because air pollution causes fatal diseases, including emphysema, chronic bronchitis, chronic asthma, pneumonia, lung cancer.

And perhaps it’s not surprising that air pollution causes lung diseases because of course we breathe it in. But I think it’s always confronting to learn that air pollution also causes, for example, coronary heart disease, strokes,

It’s also very important to know that air pollution is particularly damaging for children. It even affects babies before they’re born. So, it increases, for example, the risk of low birth rates. long term lung problems, so that’s capacity and risk of asthma, and some childhood cancers. What that means is that air pollution causes people terrible distress and pain.

And over and above that sort of burden of chronic diseases and inflammatory conditions, we estimate that air pollution from trucks kills more than 400 Australians every year.

Kat Clay: Yeah, that’s a huge and shocking fact from this report. One of the biggest proposals from your report is that of a low emissions zone.

I mean, it’s a bit controversial. The idea is to ban old trucks from Sydney and Melbourne. Why do we need these zones, Marion?

Marion Terrill: Old trucks are much more polluting than newer ones. Before 1996 there were no pollution standards at all and between 96 and 2003 just very, what by today’s standards are very weak pollution standards.

So, what that means is a truck that was sold before 1996 emits, emits at least 60 times as much particulate matter and about eight times as much nitrogen oxides as a truck sold. today. The thing about the Australian truck fleet is more than a quarter of today’s truck fleet is made up of these really old trucks.

So, we’ve got more than 14 percent of trucks were manufactured before 1996, and there are trucks on the road that are more than 40 years old. So, it is true that older trucks don’t tend to drive as many kilometres as newer trucks, but even though pre 2003 trucks only drive 8 percent of the total kilometres, they’re responsible for a third of the particulate emissions.

that are so harmful to health. So, we think the solution has to be to keep dirty old trucks away from densely populated areas. So, the most densely populated areas in Australia are Sydney and Melbourne and that is our initial focus, but I would say there’s a large number of dirty old trucks in the other major capitals too.

But we’re recommending a low emission zone in Sydney and Melbourne in the first instance, we’d like other cities to consider it as well. A low emissions zone would ban trucks from driving. manufactured before 2003 from the capital city area. So, it wouldn’t stop them from driving in country areas where there are few people, but it would protect the, the areas where there are large numbers of people from unwillingly breathing in these harmful pollutions.

Kat Clay: So, Marianne, I mean, have they put low emissions zones into place in the other countries around the world?

Marion Terrill: Absolutely. They’re really common around the world. So, there’s more than 250 cities in Europe that have got low emission zones in places like Germany, Spain, Austria, France. They’ve got them in the U.

S., Beijing, Tokyo. They’re very common. So even though we don’t have one here and people think it’s, it’s a big step, I think in reality, it’s not. So, the sky hasn’t fallen.

Kat Clay: in. Nope, the sky is still intact. So, one of the questions that came out for me reading the report is, how do you enforce a low emission zone?

I mean, it’s not like a speed camera can pick up emissions.

Marion Terrill: So, enforcement can be relatively simple. So, the simplest schemes that we’ve seen overseas use stickers. To signal the pollution emitted by each truck, for example, based on the kind of different standards, Euro standard levels. So, the truck would have to display a sticker either on its windscreen or on its number plate and trucks with particular stickers would be prohibited from entering the low emission zone.

And this could be enforced by police and parking inspectors in, in a pretty low-tech, low-cost way. And the reason to keep it very easy to implement is that we’d like to see this done and soon.

Kat Clay: So, Marion, instead of truck bans, I mean, shouldn’t we reduce our reliance on trucks? One of the commonly asked questions I hear all the time is why can’t we put more freight on rail?

I

Marion Terrill: hear that all the time too. And after all, governments have been spending a fortune on freight rail infrastructure. But the reason is that mostly, road and rail just do different jobs. So, rail mainly carries bulk consignments of commodities like coal and iron ore and grain, heading to ports on fixed schedules.

Road freight, on the other hand, encompasses all sorts of goods going from many origins to many destinations on many different schedules. And the other thing is that with rail, even if you do send goods by rail, it’s quite common for the, to get to the rail terminal by truck and from the, when you get to the other end from the rail terminal to the final destination by truck.

So, in the end, road and rail for the most part don’t compete much. And that’s why You know, we think, you know, trucks are hard to love, but they’re here to stay. So, we focused instead on how to reduce their negative impacts.

Kat Clay: Yeah, I mean, when you think about it, it’s very hard to get your supermarket delivery or, or your local furniture delivery to your house on a train.

You can’t really do that unless you live at a train station. Ingrid, we’ve talked about the low emission zone for existing trucks, but what about new trucks? I mean, surely a truck is a truck is a truck.

Ingrid Burfurd: The short answer is, Kat, that no, it’s not. not all trucks are equal. Some trucks are fitted with the world’s best pollution reducing technologies, and unfortunately some are not.

The quality of a truck’s technology in terms of air pollution is described using its Eurostandard, and you’ve probably heard us mention Eurostandards in passing already in this podcast. Eurostandards. limit the quantity of different pollutants that can be emitted from a truck. So, there are Euro standards from Euro 1 through to Euro 6.

With each progressive Euro standard, pollutant limits have been tightened because better pollution reducing technology has become available. Australia’s trucks are required to meet the Euro 5 standard, which was introduced all the way back in 2011. But most other countries including, for example, North America and Europe and plenty of countries all through Asia and the rest of the world require their trucks to meet Euro 6 standards.

And you might wonder whether or not, you know, it makes a big difference to move from 1 standard to another, but moving from Euro 5 to Euro 6 actually requires trucks to be fitted with pollution reducing technology. that halves the amount of particulate matter and nitrogen oxides that the truck can emit relative to a Euro 5 truck.

So not all trucks are equal. But is this technology hard to get? You might think it’s hard to get because, you know, it does such important work and it’s obviously quite technical, but in fact, it’s not hard to get Euro 6 technologies at all. Like, as I indicated, you know, the vast bulk of the world’s trucks.

The US and Canada have had Euro 6 standards in place for over a decade now, and Europe since 2014. So, the technology to meet Euro 6 standards is extremely widely and easily available. The key thing is though, that unless Australian regulations catch up with the rest of the world, we will Most companies don’t have an incentive to invest in this technology.

And that’s why government action is so important. We therefore recommend in our report that the federal government introduces Euro 6 standards from 2024 so that Australians can breathe cleaner air as soon as possible.

Kat Clay: So, you know how we talked at the start of the podcast about the difference between air pollution and carbon emissions?

This is the point where we move from air pollution to carbon emissions. So, Marion, there’s a lot of talk about EVs, but there hasn’t been as much talk about electric trucks. Are these key to reducing emissions?

Marion Terrill: That’s right. There’s plenty of hoopla at the moment about electric vehicles. But trucks account for 4 percent of Australia’s carbon emissions, and that’s a rising share.

We certainly hope that trucks are part of the government’s EV strategy that is unfolding now at the federal government level. Our take on this is that the sector is unlikely to fully decarbonise by 2050, but it could go some way in that direction, and we think it’s likely to be. a lower cost form of emissions reduction than many other options.

So, at the moment there’s very few zero emissions trucks in Australia and even in Europe actually, just over 2 percent of heavy vehicle sales in 2020 were zero emissions. The cost of a zero emissions truck is higher, so it is coming down, but they are, they are also cheaper to run and cheaper to maintain, so cheaper to fuel and cheaper to maintain.

But there are also practical barriers. which are non-trivial, so then these mainly relate to refuelling. Diesel trucks can refuel quickly at petrol stations, but publicly accessible hydrogen refuelling, or battery recharging stations are few and far between. And also, it takes time to recharge an electric battery and that sort of affects scheduling and how long the truck can be on the road.

Yeah, so we do think that zero emissions trucks are part of the answer. They’re obviously much lower emitting than diesels. And so to accelerate the switch, the thing about I mentioned how long trucks are on the road, so anyone deciding to buy a truck today, that truck’s going to be around in 20 years’ time, probably, and so the decisions that we make today are very important, and we think it is worth accelerating the switch to zero emissions trucks.

So, to do that. we think there should be binding sales targets. So, we’ve modelled what would happen if we had a target for rigid trucks that started at 2 percent in 2024 and gradually increased to 100 percent in 2040. Now for articulated trucks that probably isn’t realistic. So, we’re recommending 1 percent in 2024.

Going up to 70 percent in 2040. There are additional costs, and we’ve quantified those. But I think the key thing for this discussion is the benefits to the community, you know, carbon emissions avoided is one lower noise pollution is another that people don’t necessarily think of immediately. And also, there are health benefits.

So, it circles back to the, to the. the kind of pollution that you get from the exhaust pipe. So, there are benefits and we’d like to see these sort of sales targets to accelerate the switch.

Kat Clay: I mean, anyone who’s lived on a main road, this idea of lower noise pollution would really appeal. Now, Ingrid, we’ve talked about electric trucks, but what is, it’s hampering our ability to reduce emissions from trucks right now and get cleaner, greener trucks on the road.

Ingrid Burfurd: The quality of trucks that are sold in Australia directly reflects the quality of regulations that we have in place. At the moment, there are plenty of pointless regulations that make it hard to buy and drive, cleaner, greener, safer trucks. Circle back to a point Marion made at the beginning of this podcast.

She referred to Australia having, very skinny trucks. And that’s actually a very useful example, to draw on here as we think about the relationship between regulations. And the kinds of trucks we have on our road, and that’s because regulations in Australia limit trucks to a width of 2.5 meters, but European trucks are allowed to be 2.55 meters wide, and American trucks are allowed to be 2.6 meters wide.

And so Australian trucks are required to be two to 4% narrower than trucks in major markets. As you’d expect, we’re a small country. We’re only about 1 percent of the market for trucks internationally. The effect is therefore that Australian operators can’t easily buy world class technology to reduce pollution, to reduce carbon emissions, and to improve safety and reduce accidents on the road.

In light of our skinny trucks, we recommend that the federal government updates its regulations So that operators can, make full use of better technology and they can therefore buy trucks that are 2. 6 meters wide.

Kat Clay: So, Marion, I mean, you know, there’s a bit of an infrastructure nerd question, but if you open the market to wider trucks, I mean, what happens to existing roads and tunnels?

I mean, aren’t they built to very specific widths already? So, I mean, if you increase truck width, you’re going to add extra expenses to already expensive infrastructure projects and not to mention the need to upgrade existing roads.

Marion Terrill: No, in general, Australian traffic lanes are comparable to or wider than lanes in the US, the UK and Europe.

So, standard traffic lane in Australia is 3. 5 metres wide. Narrowing to three meters for low-speed roads with low truck volumes. And that’s what you get around the world. And in fact, the, the recommended width of lanes has crept up over time. The official guidance used to be 3. 3 to 3. 5, now it’s 3. 5. So, there is, there is this sort of, I think people do have the perception that it might be less safe.

Now, the example that’s always thrown at us is what about Parramatta Road? so Parramatta Road has lanes, as narrow as 2. 7 metres at one point, I believe. However, it makes little sense for a handful of idiosyncratically narrow roads, important as they may be, to stymie access to better trucks for all operators.

Kat Clay: As someone who regularly drove Parramatta Road in my university days, I can attest to the terror that is sitting in a small car between two trucks on Parramatta Road and the amount of stress that I had driving up and down that road. So, so yes, I would bring up Parramatta Road on a road with question.

One final question for you, Marion. What benefits could we see if we implemented these reforms?

Marion Terrill: Well, in a nutshell, Kat, we would get cleaner, greener, safer trucks.

Kat Clay: Short and sweet. I like it. Cleaner, greener, safer trucks. There you have it. If you would like to read the report that we’ve been talking about today, you can go and get it for free on our website at grattan.edu.au. If you’d like to talk to us about trucks or any other aspect of infrastructure or transportation, please find us on Twitter at Grattaninst and all other social media channels at Grattan Institute. We are a not-for-profit organization, and we rely on donations from our lovely listeners like you.

If you’d like to support our work or our podcast, please go to grattan.edu.au/donate to become a regular donor. As always, please take care and thanks so much for listening.