The checkweighing system is failing and overloaded trucks continue to destroy roads. Only a fraction of offences ended in fines, while the state spends tens of billions on repairs
PRESS RELEASE ON AUDIT NO 24/11 – 9 June 2025
The vehicle checkweighing system has failed in its primary function of protecting the transport infrastructure from overloaded vehicles through effective prevention and enforcement of sanctions. High-speed weighbridges often failed to work, a large number of serious offences were not even passed on to the relevant municipalities for further action by the Road and Motorway Directorate (RMD), and actual sanctions ended up at the level of a few per cent. Also due to the persistent driving of overloaded trucks, the state then spent more than CZK 73 billion on the repair and maintenance of motorways and Class I roads between 2019 and 2023. This follows from an audit executed by the Supreme Audit Office (SAO), which focused on the functioning of the checkweighing system between 2019 and 2024.
The checkweighing of vehicles was already introduced in the Czech Republic in 2000. Since 2010, automatic high-speed weighbridges have been able to perform it as well, the first of which was put into operation by the RMD in 2020. Between 2020 and 2024, high-speed weighbridges recorded a total of almost 500,000 cases of overloading of vehicles. However, only 289,000 of these cases, or approximately 58%, have been handed over to the municipalities with extended competence by the RMD for resolution. The remaining more than 200,000 cases have not been addressed at all.
Sanctions were subsequently imposed in only a fraction of cases - at most a few percent. A striking example was the high-speed weighbridge on the D1 motorway - only 250 of the roughly 9,600 offences that this single high-speed weighbridge located on the busiest motorway in the Czech Republic caught in just one month in 2024, were referred to the RMD for resolution. In the case of the weighbridge on the D35 motorway, the RMD referred only 428 of the nearly 41,000 overloading cases recorded in 2020 for resolution. In the case of the weighbridge on the D5 motorway, it did not refer for resolution even a single one of the roughly 51,000 offences detected in the same year. In the next four years, these two weighbridges did not carry out checkweighing at all. As a result, the State Fund for Transport Infrastructure collected only CZK 21 million over the four years from offences recorded by all seven weighbridges in operation.
It was the high-speed weighbridges that were to be a key element of the checkweighing system. In practice, however, they often did not work. All seven weighbridges put into operation by the RMD since 2020 have failed to perform their function on average more than 60% of the time they were put into operation. This was not only due to technical problems, but also because the Ministry of Transport (MoT) did not create the conditions for their full operation. In particular, the Ministry did not resolve cooperation with municipalities with extended competence, e.g. the issue of transferring and processing large volumes of data or the availability of relevant vehicle data. The MoD was alerted by the RMD to these serious shortcomings already in 2020 and subsequently in 2021.
The situation has not been improved by legislative changes by the MoT either. For example, the abolition of the penalty for overloading the axle and the retention of penalties only for exceeding the gross vehicle weight have significantly reduced the number of recorded offences, in some cases by up to 98%. However, vehicles with overloaded axles continue to be driven and their destructive effect on the roads persists. Yet it is driving with an overloaded axle that causes significantly more damage to the road than an overweight vehicle. Thus, the modifications pushed through by the Ministry have only solved the real problem on paper, but not on the roads.
Part of the checkweighing system is also the so-called low-speed weighing performed mainly by mobile weighbridges. However, this has been carried out only sparingly and has focused mainly on vehicles weighing up to three and a half tonnes instead of significantly heavier trucks. In 2023, for example, only 233 trucks1 were checked by these weighbridges on motorways, while in the same year high-speed weighbridges detected more than 77,000 overloaded vehicles on motorways.
"The Ministry of Transport and the Road and Motorway Directorate have not made much progress in solving the problem of damage to Czech motorways by overloaded trucks even in a quarter of a century. The system has simply not been set up to function efficiently and thus fulfil its repressive and preventive role. That is, to discourage freight operators from driving overloaded vehicles on state-owned roads, damaging them and shortening their service life. Billions of crowns are thus unnecessarily wasted from the state budget, i.e. from the taxpayers' pockets, to repair damages that did not have to occur at all," said Jan Kinšt, a Member of the SAO who led the audit.
Communication Department
Supreme Audit Office
1] Low speed checkweighing of vehicles on motorways carried out with the involvement of the Road Transport Service Centre, which will be transformed into the Road Transport Inspectorate from 1 July 2025.