Road Carriers and Stevedores Servicing Port Botany are Subject to Mandatory Performance Standards
Road carriers and stevedores servicing Port Botany are subject to mandatory performance standards that regulate road freight movements to and from the port.
Port Botany Landside Operations Mandatory Standards (the Mandatory Standards) 2021 (PDF, 403.15 KB)
The standards are embedded in the Ports and Maritime Administration Regulation 2021. They came into force in 2010 and were last updated in September 2021.
Consultation on proposed change to the Mandatory Standards
Transport for NSW consulted with stakeholders on a proposed change the Mandatory Standards truck time zones in May 2022. The proposed change would allow time zones for truck booking slots to start every half hour, the slots would continue to be one hour in length and overlap with adjacent time zones. This change has not been implemented to date.
Background and previous changes made to the Mandatory Standards
The current Mandatory Standards were last updated September 2021.
- Summary of changes made to standards in 2021 (PDF, 411.01 KB)
- Order issuing new mandatory standards 2021 (PDF, 144.39 KB)
- Mandatory Standards effective 1 September 2021 compared to standards effective from 18 December 2015 (PDF, 1.09 MB)
Mandatory standards were introduced under the Port Botany Landside Improvement Strategy (PBLIS) following a 2008 Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART) finding that significant changes needed to be made to reduce port landside congestion and improve the efficiency of the interface between the stevedores and the road transporters.
Read the IPART report (PDF, 1.09 MB) and the NSW Government response (PDF, 94.57 KB).
Detailed information
Operational performance measures
Operational performance measures improve efficiency at Port Botany’s landside interface by encouraging the port supply chain’s stakeholders to be accountable to each other for their on time and servicing performance.
The operational performance measures are:
Road carriers: early arrivals, late arrivals, no shows, and cancellation of bookings (listings)
Stevedores: minimum number of slots offered per hour, truck turnaround time, failure or refusal to perform truck servicing, and time zone cancellations.
There are approximately 350 road carriers regularly operating at at the three stevedores in Port Botany. The stevedores are DP World Australia, Sydney Autostrad Terminal and Sydney International Container Terminals Limited.
Financial penalties and invoicing
Road carriers and stevedores are required to adhere to their operational performance measures to be compliant with the mandatory standards. If the standards are not met and the carrier or stevedore is found liable, they must pay a financial penalty to the other party.
Financial penalties are issued through each stevedore’s invoicing process. Stevedores invoice road carriers that have not met operational performance measures detailing penalties they owe. They ‘self-invoice’ for financial penalties they owe to road carriers.
Transport for NSW monitors and audits these invoicing processes.