Automatic monitoring of the weights of vehicles may be introduced in Ukraine in January 2016. Roman Khmil, the head of the Ministry of Infrastructure’s department of motor transport and strategic development of roads, announced this to journalists, the Interfax Ukraine news agency reports.
"The optimistic date of introduction of the system into operation is January 2016. The project can be implemented in two months. The main difficulty is the legislation, which needs to be changed," he said.
According Khmil, operation of the weight monitoring system requires at least 50 automatic weighing facilities, but the optimal number is between 100 and 200. Accordingly, the cost of the project is between USD 5 million and USD 15 million.
As reported, the Czech company Star Trans Euro installed the first automatic weighing system worth about EUR 300,000 on the Kyiv-Chop road in June 2013, using its own funds.
The system is equipped with quartz sensors for weighing vehicles in motion, induction measuring elements for determining their speed of travel, and digital video cameras for recording their licenses plates and the vehicles themselves, their speed, and their date and time of travel. The sensors are buried under the road surface and connected by cables to a central unit, where the information is sent. Its measurements have a maximum error margin of 5%.
It was reported at the same time that 12 systems were planned for installation in 2013 and 60 in 2014 and that funding from the state budget was expected to total UAH 29.12 million in 2013 and UAH 142.72 million in 2014.
However, it emerged in February 2014 that funds for financing installation of such systems were not allocated in 2013, and the State Road Safety Inspectorate (Ukrtransinspektsia) said in April 2014 that it saw no further need to install such automatic systems on Ukrainian roads. Despite this, Minister of Infrastructure Andrii Pyvovarskyi said in March 2015 that the Ministry of Infrastructure had returned to the idea of implementing automatic regulation of the weights of vehicles on Ukrainian roads.
