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It is a well known and iniquitous fact that every year overloaded trucks cause around 600-million Rands worth of damage to South Africa’s roads. A journey along any of the major transport routes in the country will bear witness to this; the N3 is no exception.

Surveys have found that a significant proportion of all trucks weighed along the N3 were overloaded to some degree or other. There are many reasons behind the high incidence of overloading, the most prominent being commercial self interest.

"Limited recourse project finance - such as the N3TC concession - is largely dependent on the ability to identify and manage the major risks inherent in the project – overloaded vehicles is one such risk," N3TC CEO Tim Ivins says emphatically. "There is no sound economic sense in getting involved in this business if we do not make a sustained effort to prevent overloading. It simply will not be tolerated,"

How Ivins aims to succeed where heretofore the authorities are battling is quite simple: "N3TC will install moving and static weighbridges and provide technical and administrative assistance to the authorities to enable them to enforce the law regarding overloaded vehicles on the highway."