In a long interview bemoaning the multitude of challenges faced by the Czech haulage industry, including “unbearable" additional costs, the boss of the Czech haulage association (Česmad Bohemia) has claimed that the problem of overloaded lorries in the country is not nearly as bad as is being made out.
The comments were made by the Czech Haulage Association’s General Secretary, Vojtěch Hromíř, in an interview with Dopravní noviny that was published on the association’s homepage.
Referring to negative headlines in the Czech press about overloaded trucks, Hromíř said: “There are sometimes misleading reports in the media about weight checks being carried out on vehicles presumed to be overloaded, and a certain percentage of them are actually affected. A large part of this may be vehicles with a low permitted weight, which they exceed, for example vans up to 3.5 t. However, a headline appears in the media that a third of vehicles are destroying our roads. It is mainly the axle overload that is harmful, not the total load of the set of vehicles, if it is within the norm. From this point of view, only a small number of vehicles actually “destroy” our roads.”
Hromíř added that this information is included in mainstream reports, but towards the end. In his view, such reports do not help with the industry’s image.
Another contributing factor here, according to Hromíř, is the Supreme Audit Office’s criticism of the Directorate of Roads and Motorways. Hromíř says the latter was criticised for modernizing the D1 motorway and then allowing HGVs to damage it due to a lack of weight checks.
This, argues the Czech Haulage Association boss, leads to the public and politicians believing just about every truck on the Czech Republic’s roads is overloaded.
“I even heard from one politician that two trucks arrive from Germany as a standard, and at the border the load is transferred to one and it continues onwards, because nobody here weighs it. I would treat this as ridiculous if it didn’t promote a negative perception of trucking as a whole and suggest that only overloaded trucks drive here,” added Hromíř.
