Industrial forestry within the Southland region of New Zealand is forecast to double over the next 20 years as the availability of wood from production forest plantations increases dramatically. This is generating unprecedented pressure on the public road network. An issue has arisen between government and industry over which should pay for the increasing road upgrading, rehabilitation, and maintenance costs generated by the burgeoning traffic, with the Southland Regional Council proposing a fourfold increase in the road-related rates (tax) charged to the forest industry. In an effort to produce an independent model of the forest industry's use of the road system, regional spatial data sets characterizing the wood supply, demand for wood, and road network were assembled and verified. The transportation geographic information system software package TransCAD was then used to determine the optimum distribution pattern for Southland's wood production. It was confirmed that an accurate model of the current transportation of wood in the region had been created. Distribution patterns under four input scenarios were analyzed. For domestic sawlogs, rearranging supply contracts was predicted to provide transportation savings, measured in annual tonne-kilometers, of just under 40%. On the other hand, there appeared to be no gains to be made in using unconstrained haul routes—the routes in current use are near the optimum. The predictive power of the model was illustrated for the case of chip logs, in which significant changes in traffic patterns were predicted for the 2009 harvest year, along with an order-of-magnitude increase in traffic volumes. The work revealed that the origin of the fourfold rate increase to be charged to forestry is in an arbitrary “perceived damage factor” applied to the numerically modeled traffic flows.
Log Truck Transportation on Public Roads in New Zealand
Regional Network Analysis with Geographic Information Systems
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board ; 1989-1 , 1 ; 34-40
2007-01-01
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
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