Freight
Chapter 4
This chapter focuses on Freight and explores the amount of goods moved in the Australian economy. The data from this chapter is sourced from BITRE’s Trainline and Australian Sea Freight publications, along with other unpublished estimates.
- Melbourne had the most metropolitan road fright estimated at 17.1 billion tonne‑kilometres in 2022‑23.
- NSW’s estimated road freight for 2022-23 was the highest on record at 84 billion tonne‑kilometres.
Figure 1 Australia’s Domestic freight, 2022-23
Freight transport activity (Figure 1) is measured in terms of tonne kilometres (the number of tonnes moved by a vehicle multiplied by the distance the load travelled in kilometres).
Figure 2 Australian domestic freight task, by mode of transport
The Australian domestic freight task (Figure 2) has experienced strong growth over the last 40 years, with road and rail freight now dominating domestic freight activity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the total bulk and non-bulk freight task fell slightly, from its height of 780.0 billion tkm in 2018-19 to 759.7 billion tkm in 2020-21. It has grown over the last two years, however, reaching its second-highest point in 2022-23 of 778.7 billion tkm.