Heavy vehicle speed compliance
The Department of Transport and Main Roads implemented new heavy vehicle speed compliance laws on 1 July 2010.
Background
The Queensland Government has passed the Transport Legislation Amendment Act (no. 13) 2010, based on the National Road Transport Reform (Compliance and Enforcement) Bill 2003. This included amendments to the Transport Operations (Road Use Management) Act 1995 to incorporate heavy vehicle speed compliance legislation.
What we are doing
The department adopted national model legislation on heavy vehicle speeding compliance developed by the National Transport Commission and approved by the Australian Transport Council in December 2007.
Purpose of heavy vehicle speed compliance
Heavy vehicle speed compliance focuses on the chain of responsibility and places obligations on certain parties within the transport chain to ensure their actions or inactions do not cause the driver of a heavy vehicle to exceed any speed limit. The provisions in the legislation are preventative in nature and seek to ensure that business practices do not encourage heavy vehicle speeding.
Changes to legislation
- The amendments to the Transport Operations (Road Use Management) Act 1995 requires certain parties within the chain of responsibility to take all reasonable steps to ensure that their actions – for example their scheduling, loading or consigning activities – will not cause the driver of a heavy vehicle to exceed any speed limit.
- The chain of responsibility parties identified in the model legislation includes employers, operators, prime contractors, schedulers, loading managers, and certain consignors and consignees. These are the parties who, other than the driver, are most directly responsible for the operation of a heavy vehicle.
- Parties charged with an offence under this legislation have the benefit of the reasonable steps defence. This means they must be able to establish that they took all reasonable steps to prevent a heavy vehicle speeding offence from occurring.
- The legislation provides guidance as to what constitutes the taking of reasonable steps for example, taking steps to identify what aspects of their activities might cause a driver to speed and to identify what steps can be taken to avoid or minimise that risk.
More detailed information can be found in the
Heavy vehicle speed compliance FAQ sheet (PDF, 64 KB).
Fact Sheets
