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End this torture at weighbridge stations
2005-07-21 07:02:34
By Editor
The decision to install weighbridge stations on the country’s major roads is commendable in that it is aimed at protecting a vital segment of the our infrastructure.
The weighbridges are meant to prevent overloaded commercial vehicles from damaging roads that have been painstakingly built with our meagre resources supplemented with loans and grants from the country’s development partners.
However, most of these facilities are slowly turning into an irritating inconvenience for road users, especially bus passengers and bus and truck operators.
Long queues of buses and lorries waiting to be weighed for anything up to an hour or more are the order of the day at most of the weighbridge stations dotted around the country.
The situation is especially critical at the Kibaha weighbridge station, some 35 kilometres west of Dar es Salaam.
The station serves the busiest stretch of the highway linking Dar es Salaam and northern and southern Tanzania and has proven to be woefully inadequate despite having two fully computerised weighbridges.
Long queues of buses and trucks stretching up to a kilometre on both sides are now synonymous with the facility, especially in the evenings when dozens of commercial vehicles converge on the site.
People using public service vehicles will agree that there are a few things as annoying as being held up at a weighbridge station a few kilometres from your destination for an additional hour or so after enduring a 12-hour bus journey.
This is why we are heartened by the government’s announcement in Parliament recently that plans are underway to modernise the Kibaha station by introducing the so-called \’drive through\’ weighbridges which are capable of weighing vehicles while in motion.
It is hoped that the new weighbridges will go a long way in reducing congestion at the station and save passengers and bus and truck operators valuable time that would have otherwise been lost at the site.
However, the decision will end up being a temporary solution if the new machines will not be properly maintained.
Lack of maintenance is to blame for the frequent breakdown of weighbridges in the country.
Anyone who has travelled to southern and northern Tanzania by road should know that the Chalinze, Makambako and Himo weighbridges are invariably out of order and the reason is maintenance or rather the lack of it.
The result is that mobile weighbridges are used at the stations, making the process of weighing vehicles, especially multi-axle heavy trucks, painfully slow.
Much as we support the existence of weighbridge stations in the country, we feel that it is high time the government took comprehensive measures to enable them cope with the ever-increasing number of heavy commercial vehicles on our roads.
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