In the recent safety blitz by NSW police hundreds of trucks were found to be non-compliant with police saying that there is a lot more work to be done to eradicate all of the rogue operators.
Operation North Canuck, which was an initiative jointly, run by NSW Police and the Roads and Maritime Services gave out 184 defect notices, 240 traffic infringements and 30 breach notices to truck drivers in a two day period on the Pacific, Newell and New England Highways.
The operation ran from 6pm on the 17th February to 10pm on the 19th February and specifically targeted the north of the state on the areas of Coffs Harbour, Grafton, Kankool and Moree.
Police Superintendent Stuart Smith said that in the last couple of years both the police and RMS have been working hard to eradicate the incidence of speeding trucks on the roads.
He said that there was a significant reduction of trucks found to be speeding in 2012 when compared to 2011. But he said that Operation North Canuck showed that there was still a great deal to be done.
During the operation the authorities focused on speed limiter tampering, drink and drug driving, fatigue, vehicle standards and load restraints and inspected 1,231 trucks in total.
The NSW Police said that they downloaded the electronic control modules (ECM) of 304 trucks and found as a result that 32 of those trucks had actually tampered with their speed limiters; these vehicles were grounded so that they could me inspected more closely.
One of the trucks had an illegal setting that meant the truck was able to travel up to 150 kph – the NSW speed limit for trucks is 100 kph.
The results of Operation North Canuck were published a few days following the release of data that showed NSW had been able to significantly reduce the incidents of heavy vehicle speeding.
