Exhaust pollutants from Australia’s ancient truck fleet kill more than 400 Australians every year by causing or contributing to diseases including lung cancer, stroke, heart disease, pneumonia, asthma, and type-2 diabetes.
A new report from Grattan Institute asserts that old trucks should be banned from Sydney and Melbourne as part of a comprehensive plan to reduce Australians’ exposure to deadly air pollution.
Bike riders have direct and proximate experience of our nation’s decrepit trucks fleet, sharing the road with them every day.
And for us, pollution is only half the story: their lack of contemporary safety features is the other—just as life-threatening—half of the tale.
And, as the Grattan study points out, the two problems are closely interlinked because our old polluting trucks are built to old, out-of-date safety standards.
And that is not by accident, it is by design—Australia’s minimum standards for both truck emissions and truck safety are way behind that of most advanced economies.
Grattan says pre-2003 diesel trucks should be banned in Sydney and Melbourne from 2025.
"Fourteen per cent of the Australian fleet is pre-1996, and these trucks emit 60 times the particulate matter of a new truck, and eight times the poisonous nitrogen oxides,” Grattan reports.
"Hundreds of cities around the world have imposed similar bans on dirty trucks, including London, Tokyo, Beijing, Barcelona, and Madrid.
"But even the new trucks coming into Australia aren’t as clean as they should be. Our pollution standard for trucks is a decade behind major global markets. Australia should catch up to the international pollution standard from 2024,” the report says.
Trucks contribute 4 per cent of Australia’s carbon emissions, and Grattan says that to help Australia meet its target of net-zero emissions by 2050, the federal government should impose binding sales targets for zero-emissions trucks, starting at 2 per cent in 2024 and gradually increasing to cover most new sales by 2040.
"In the meantime, the government should ensure new diesel trucks emit less carbon, by imposing standards on engines and tyres and ratcheting up those standards each year."
Read what Bicycle Network had to say last year about truck standards here.
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