The overloaded vehicle crackdown effort by high-precision automatic axle weighing system in Hanshin Expressway

The Hanshin Expressway has a network of 242 kilometers in the Kansai urban area (Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto) of Japan, and contributes to its economy and life. The most essential tasks are prevention of extensive damage to road structures, mitigation of noise and vibration caused by the vehicles such as overloaded trucks, and prevention traffic accidents. Therefore, the authors have set up an automatic axle weighing system on the expressway toll plazas, and have been cracking down on the overloaded vehicles. The system can measure vehicle’s static axle loads while they pass through toll plazas at the maximum speed 20 kilometers per hour. However, the system has to measure the loads from running vehicles at about 40 kilometers per hour, because ETC, or Electronic Toll Collection System, has been installed in the toll plazas, and a vehicle passes through without decelerating. To solve this problem, the high-precision automatic axle weighing system has been developed and installed in 119 toll plazas with the ETC system. This paper explains the outline of the high-precision automatic axle weighing system and the results of performance tests. In addition, the crackdown effort on overloaded vehicles is introduced.