With the growth of freight volumes rising to meet with demands, Australian transport infrastructure has faced challenges in the past as the authorities and government look for measures to stay afloat. This is by looking at it on the national level to ensure that the Australian transport sector is able to deliver “a streamlined, integrated and multimodal transport and logistics system”.
The Australian transport infrastructure has seen many changes in the last couple of years, especially with this direction towards transforming itself into a multimodal network. With still work underway to connect the north and west regions of Australian with a multi modal system, we look at the current standing of the multimodal terminal currently present that links to the network of road and rail with air and sea ports. In the following image, we can see the green intermodal terminals and the purple road train assembly points which are crucial to the domestic Australia transport infrastructure and supply chain.
The following image features the major air and sea ports that link up to the intermodal terminals and road/train assembly points that link up the international and domestic Australian transport infrastructure together.
A traditional supply chain will look as follows with a shared supply chain and thereafter an international or domestic supply chain with its own sub processes as depicted, which is seemingly complex and becoming longer.
A new proposal by the Australian Post is in the works to facilitate larger scale processing terminals and such that are supported regionally. The new proposal for the Australian infrastructure features a two-tier system that forks the first tier to smaller regional hubs for customer locations and the second tier for larger processing centers as follows.
With plans to overhaul Australian transport infrastructure on a national level, there are also induvial ports developments that are occurring to propel the reginal logistics sector further to ensure that capacities and demand and supply are in line.