Scourge of overloading
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China Daily, July 21, 2011
Nothing can be more illustrative of the damage overloaded trucks cause to highways and bridges than the collapse of two bridges in a week.
The truck that caused one end of a bridge to collapse in Wuyishan, East China's Fujian province on July 14, had a carrying capacity of 15.5 tons, but was actually loaded with more than 60 tons of cargo.
A 14-meter-long truck is estimated to have been carrying about 160 tons of sand on Tuesday night when a bridge in Beijing's suburban Huairou district broke under its weight. The bridge is near a site where the illegal mining of sand is rampant and trucks reportedly transport sand in the evening to evade inspection.
Overloaded trucks in pursuit of maximum profits were said to have been running across both bridges fairly often in recent years and it seems the trucks involved were just the final straws.
Overloading has been a scourge in recent decades. Campaigns have been organized nationwide many times to crack down on this particular transport rule violation but to little avail.
It is estimated that the cost of repairing the highways and bridges damaged by overloaded trucks is as much as 30 billion yuan ($4.6 billion) a year and that the lifespan of highways or expressways is reduced by 50 to 60 percent.
In addition, trucks overloaded cause about 70 percent of traffic accidents on expressways.
But why do so many transport firms run the risk of traffic accidents and fines to overload their trucks?
One of the explanations is that too many tollgates charge too high fees, which have considerably raised the cost of transportation, and overloading cargo is what transport companies use to offset such fees. This may not be unreasonable as the fees charged by toll stations are said to constitute one third of the total cost of the country's logistics.
But would the closing down of the increasing number of toll stations nationwide reduce the number of transport trucks overloaded?
Currently self-employed transporters make up nearly 90 percent of the nearly 7 million transport firms nationwide, which means competition is fierce and profits are thin. Overloading their limited number of trucks will be one of the few ways for them to make a profit.
The regulations on the protection of highway safety that took effect on July 1 this year will ban drivers and vehicles from the transport sector after three overloading violations, and firms will be closed down if 10 percent of their vehicles violate the rules within a year.
Enforcing this should be only the first step in a push to restructure the sector and tackle the overloading problem.
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