The Ministry of Transport will protect the asphalt with fines – Newspaper Kommersant No. 55 (7500) of 03/31/2023

A fine of 10 thousand rubles. and deprivation of rights – such a sanction threatens truck drivers in case of refusal to pass the weight and size control at the request of the inspector of Rostransnadzor. The Ministry of Transport initiated the relevant amendments to the Code of Administrative Offenses. Experts believe the proposed sanctions are too harsh, they could lead to increased corruption on the roads.

The Ministry of Transport posted on regulation.gov.ru a draft amendment to the Code of Administrative Offenses, introducing a new offense into the code. For “failure by the driver of the legal requirement of an authorized official to pass the weight and dimensional control of the vehicle” a fine of 10 thousand rubles is introduced. with deprivation of rights for up to six months (the sanction will be appointed by the court). The owner of the heavy truck will be fined 500 thousand rubles. The car will be sent to the impound.

The obligation to provide a truck for weighing and measuring dimensions at the request of the inspector of Rostransnadzor has long been fixed in the traffic rules, but there was no sanction for failure to fulfill the obligation. The code contains a “general” norm providing for a fine of 500–800 rubles. for failure to comply with the requirements of an employee to stop, but as a rule, it does not work on violators: drivers simply “ignore” the requirement, the Ministry of Transport writes. The number of drivers evading inspection, according to Rostransnadzor, increased from 15.4 thousand in 2019 to 21.3 thousand in 2022. The share of “dodgers,” the department says, in the total number of trucks checked increased from 11% to 16% in 2019-2022. In November 2022, Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin instructed the Ministry of Transport to develop amendments introducing fines for violators.

The Ministry of Transport calculated that overloaded trucks cause damage to roads, increasing the cost of their maintenance by more than 700 billion rubles. per year only on the federal network. If control is not tightened, the road network will face “rapid degradation,” the materials for the amendments say. “This will lead to the complete leveling of all the successes and achievements of the Safe High-Quality Roads national project, all previously used financial resources will be wasted,” the Ministry of Transport writes. “The construction of new roads will be impossible due to lack of financial resources. The road network will become a constraint for the development of other sectors of the economy. This will negatively affect the entire economy of the country as a whole.” The ministry also believes that the imposition of sanctions will lead to a reduction in accidents with heavy vehicles, which, as a rule, pose a high “social danger” (often resulting in deaths, since an overloaded truck that has an accident literally sweeps away everything in its path). According to the department, out of 42 regions where the Ministry of Transport applied for an opinion, 33 supported the initiative.

Rostransnadzor fixes the excess also with the help of automatic points of weight and size control (APVGK). Now there are 380 such points on regional, intermunicipal and municipal roads, by 2030 there will be 600 of them. In March, the auditor of the Accounts Chamber, Valery Bogomolov, said that in fact half of the APVGK was not working as of January 1: “That is, the money has been spent, the points have been established, but they are not doing their job. Fines that are issued using automatic scales have been administered by Rostransnadzor (formerly the traffic police) since January 1, since the beginning of the year more than 18,000 fines have been issued.

Member of the State Duma Committee on Transport Vitaly Efimov (United Russia), president of the Union of Transport Workers of Russia, considers the sanctions proposed by the Ministry of Transport to be excessive. “You can punish with a ruble, the driver will stand it, but you shouldn’t deprive him of his rights – this is actually deprivation of work, what if he has a family? – says the deputy. – Instead of the owner, it is better then to punish the consignor, who is responsible for the overload.

The adoption of the bill may lead to an increase in corruption, said Vladimir Matyagin, president of the Gruzoavtotrans association, member of the Public Council on Rostransnadzor. “The salaries of the Rostransnadzor inspectors are low, 17-20 thousand rubles, even with the current fines, they are tempted to “let go” of the driver. With new sanctions, fares will simply increase. The overweight problem cannot be solved this way,” he says. “First, you need to create working conditions so that there is no reason for corruption.” Mr. Matyagin also talks about another problem: for the scales to work correctly, you need to fulfill a lot of requirements provided by the manufacturer, including the use of a flat concrete platform. Inspectors often do not comply. “In 2021, we conducted an independent assessment of the mobile stations of Rostransnadzor and identified only one correctly functioning point – on the Crimean bridge across the Kerch Strait,” he said.

Ivan Buranov