The Kenya National Highways Authority is set to construct additional virtual weighbridges in Western Kenya.
This comes after increased activities in the areas led to a sharp rise in lorries dodging the weighbridges.
Speaking during a stakeholder engagement meeting with Migori county government, KENHA’s Nyanza director Eng. Julius Mak’odero said Virtual weighbridges have been instrumental in nabbing axle load offenders.
“Going forward we need to replicate this technology to other parts of the country such as Nyanza.”
Virtual weighbridges as special scales build on roads and can detect the weight of a moving vehicle without them having to check in to weighbridges.
These virtual scales flag overloaded trucks and relay the information to control centers where KeNHA can then divert the truck to the nearest weighbridge or deploy a mobile unit to confirm the overload.
Coupled with the weigh-in-motion technology. the effectiveness has seen KeNHA weigh only 20 per cent of the trucks on the highway.
This cuts down weighbridge traffic to near zero as only flagged vehicles proceed for weight confirmation.
Migori is a regional source of building materials despite most of the sites being illegal.
As a result, heavier trucks are crisscrossing the roads leading to extensive damage to road infrastructure.
Through improving the weighbridges technology, KeNHA aims at cutting the costs of maintaining road infrastructure
