The Ministry of Infrastructure has prepared and submitted to the Cabinet of Ministers a draft resolution on increasing the penalty for exceeding the maximum weight of loads that can be transported by road. Minister of Infrastructure Andrii Pyvovarskyi announced this at a meeting with Prime Minister Arsenii Yatseniuk in Pereyaslav-Khmelnytsky on Friday, 21 August, the Interfax Ukraine news agency reports.
"Fines will be very large," the minister said, noting that this resolution provides for introduction of responsibility for such violations by consignors and vehicle owners.
Read more: Ukrainian Carrier Exceeds Load Limit For Road Trains Three Times
According to Pyvovarskyi, "we will not have normal roads" until the problem of overloading of trucks is solved.
As reported, a road organization recently installed a weighing system on a road in the Nikolayev region, but the weighing system was removed after truck drivers blocked the road.
Andrii Vadaturskyi, a former deputy director of Nibulon - one of the largest exporters of agricultural products in Ukraine - and the son of the Nibulon’s owner, said on 19 August that he opposed weighing systems on roads because this was a false approach to the fight against overloading on Ukrainian roads.
At the same time, according to estimates by the CFTS portal, around 1.5 million tons of grain was transported to Nibulon by road in 2014, which constituted about 30% of the total.
