Austroads Project on Heavy Vehicle Rest Areas

We are pleased to announce that we will be working to support Austroads over the next year to deliver best practice guidance on heavy vehicle rest area (HVRA) facilities by updating the Austroads guidelines for Australia and NZ and improving the availability of data on rest area utilisation.

We will be:
​- Reviewing and incorporating best practice learnings to enhance both the strategic direction and the planning and design concepts of the guidelines.
- Confirming the Strategic principles underpinning the Guidelines are reflective of Austroads members’ current and emerging priorities for heavy vehicle networks.
- Ensuring the currency of references made in the Guidelines, such as AS1742.6:2014 Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices: Tourist and Services Signs.
- Ensuring the strategic direction of the Guidelines is consistent with evolving fatigue management legislation and regulations.
- Developing options to support and inform providers, other than road managers, around opportunities to provide heavy vehicle rest areas (such as in towns and at commercial facilities), including recommendations that Planning regulations set minimum standards for new HVRAs.
- Incorporating case studies to support (1) users to develop complementary state and or local strategic policy documents, (2) planning and design concepts and (3) support communication and engagement with interested parties.
- Ensuring the Guidelines provide recommendations which consider the needs of a diverse workforce when accessing heavy vehicle rest areas. This could increase the available driver pool, and potentially alleviate driver shortages.
- Ensuring that the design specifications for heavy vehicle rest areas are reflective of the evolving fleet, including newly designed vehicles, low and zero emission vehicles, dangerous goods vehicles and oversize and overmass vehicles.
- Summarising information sources available for road managers (including telematics and other technologies) on the location and attributes of rest areas and utilisation of heavy vehicle parking spaces in real-time.
- Devising options to provide a data source for road managers and the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator to share with the heavy vehicle industry.
- Determining the requirements of a service to provide road managers with insights into the use of rest areas to inform planning and investment decisions using data collected from vehicles in the National Telematics Framework and other sources.