Measuring freight performance across modes through universal metrics

Understanding how Australia’s domestic freight network is performing is becoming more important as freight continues to grow. Disruptions in recent years, including weather events and COVID-19, have highlighted this importance further, to ensure communities across the country remain connected and have access to goods and services. In order to improve our network, we need to know how it is performing, where network strengths and weaknesses are, to target improvements and interventions.

Freight often travels across various modes of transportation from its origin to destination, including passing through intermodal terminals. This challenge seeks to explore what kind of national metrics could be used to clearly capture and measure performance across all modes - air, rail, road and sea, in an interoperable way in key areas of activity, cost, time, employment, sustainability, value.

• What should we define as key metrics?

• Can we harmonise performance measures across modes to fully represent the amount and value of freight each mode carries?

• What data can we use to measure network performance?

• Where are the gaps in our data?

• How do we define a baseline to benchmark performance over time?

The ability to track performance is an important tool in strategic and operational decision-making, such as predicting and planning for the potential impact of disruptions, and analysing where investment may be required to maintain or improve performance.

Additional Information

Relevant links:

• Freight Performance Dashboard | National Freight Data Hub

Image credit: National Freight Data Hub.