Overweight truckers stopped by tech checks

Rogue drivers in overloaded trucks are doing huge damage to UK motorways - and now technology is leading the fightback.

One axle overloaded by one tonne can cause the same road wear as 18,000 Mondeos.

And in a recent trial by the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (Vosa) 442 overweight vehicles were spotted which together would do the same road damage as 18.7 million average family cars.

Now overloaded trucks are being pulled off the motorways faster through the use of new technology combining number plate recognition and motorway sensors.

Vosa is using the Viper service to spot and stop overweight vehicles. The system combines Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) and Weigh-In Motion System (Wims) technologies - electronic strips set into the road surface.

A sensor counts and weighs the axles of the vehicles and compares that to the technical data held on that type of vehicle.

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If the lorry is carrying more weight than it should an alert is sent to the Vosa control room with pictures of the vehicle taken from the ANPR system which can then be used by Vosa's enforcement officers to spot and stop the vehicle.

The tech for ANPR has been around for some time. Wims is a more recent technology.

Kevin James, ANPR/Wims senior business owner at Vosa said: "Where the real technology comes in is blending the two together."

Following a successful pilot of Viper on a stretch of the M6 motorway near Birmingham which achieved a 700 per cent improvement in identifying and prohibiting overweight vehicles, Vosa has chosen to roll out the traffic management solution to a number of sites across the UK.

The system was developed by Vosa with Applied Traffic and Civica. It is now live at one motorway site and a UK port, with another 14 sites due to be rolled out across the country.