Bridges

Transport for New South Wales, (TfNSW) receives thousands of requests every year to allow Higher Productivity Vehicles (HPV), high risk mobile cranes and heavy load platforms to access NSW aging road and bridge network. The HPV's access requests in NSW are increasing at an unprecedented rate in recent years due to productivity gain from smarter vehicles. The need to respond to these requests promptly, without compromising the safety of the network, has led to the development of a cost- effective, fully automated bridge assessment tool.

The paper describes the development of a one stop heavy vehicle access tool called the Rapid Bridge Assessment Tool (RBAT) by TfNSW. The paper also discusses the five key modules in the RABT algorithm. This newly developed RBAT will replace the existing semi-automated E-Heavy tool to facilitate both the efficient processing of heavy vehicle applications to access the stateís bridges and the risk management of the network. The RBAT imports the requested route layer from the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR) Road Manager Portal via an Application Programming Interface (API) and populates the restricted bridge structures on a web map. This tool provides a simple, consistent, and user-friendly report which will streamline the heavy vehicle approvals process.

The application of RBAT is fully automated, leading to significant time and cost saving in the HPV access approval process including those under the Performance Based Standards (PBS) scheme.