National Highway No. 5 has seen a sudden sharp fall in the number of trucks and container vehicles after the Directorate for Roads of Vietnam and Road and Railway Traffic Police Department began the pilot application of a scale station to check vehicle loads.
Transport firms have halted operations of their deliberately overloaded vehicles until the mobile weighing stations change locations
The agencies put a mobile scale station on the national highway on the morning of April 9 along the section running through Haiphong City’s Le Thien Commune. The trial implementation will last until April 28.
The National Highway No.5, the key road between Hanoi and Haiphong, often receives around 6,000 container vehicles per day, but over the past two days, the road has seen a huge decline in freight transportation.
On the days, the force detected just 15 vehicles which transported cargoes higher than their regulated levels. According to Senior Lieutenant-colonel Luu Thanh Hiep from Road and Railway Traffic Police Department, most of the vehicles carried empty containers, attributing this as the trick of transport firms to explore the scale station’s capacity.
A driver who often operates his lorry along the route said, “I have temporarily stopped operating my vehicle until they move the scale station somewhere else.”
Nguyen Minh Van, owner of a transport enterprise which manages nearly 50 trucks in Haiphong, said he could not sleep last night because he knew that if his company’s vehicle had been operated, they would been found overloaded.
Container vehicles are waiting at depots at Haiphong, particularly Chua Ve Port until the scale station stops working.
Many difficulties
Le Van Tien, Chairman of Haiphong City Transport Association, said despite the scale station’s operation, it still lacked handling equipment and stores to contain and preserve cargoes. It would not be effective enough to impose the fine only because once over-loaded vehicles were still allowed to continue after paying their fines, so would continue damaging roads and causing possible accidents.
Colonel Bui Dinh Chien, Head of Haiphong City Traffic Police, said scale stations should be located near ports in cases where the cargo could spoil. This would help to save costs for hiring depots as well. He also agreed to reduce the load carried by vehicles, not just imposing fines.
During the 1993-2003 period, management agencies installed 27 scale stations on national highways, but due to out-of-date equipment systems, it took them large amounts of time to check vehicle weights. In some cases, some staff co-operated with drivers to ignore violations.
The Ministry of Transport established two pilot scale stations at National Highway 1 in Dong Nai Province and National Highway No. 18 in Quang Ninh Province but they proved insufficient to deal with a huge number of violators.
The Directorate for Roads of Vietnam has proposed the implementation of 67 mobile scale stations at routes which witness a high number of overloaded vehicles.
