Larger gardening work, renovations or rough cleaning are often part of the summer season, and thus also driving large loads of waste to the tip.
However, the rubbish you fill the trailer with can weigh unexpectedly much, and the police are now warning of the risk of accidentally driving with an overload on smaller trailers. It reports We Car Owners.
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Highest risk with downgraded trailer
The warning specifically applies to so-called downgraded trailers, which are designed for heavier loads but have been classified as light trailers so that motorists with a regular B driving license can tow them.
– An unbraked cart is designed for a maximum of 750 kilos and in other words built a little more compactly, where the overload is a little easier to see, says Richard Nilsson, traffic police and operational coordinator at region west, to Vi Bilägare.
On a stronger trailer, however, it is not as clear that the load weight is excessive.
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Consider the weight of the trailer itself
The stronger construction also weighs more, and since the weight of the trailer is included in the total weight, this reduces how much you can load before the trailer is too heavy.
The risk is that you may not load much more than 450 kilos, and if you are caught for overloading, the penalties can be serious.
– If we weigh the trailer at 825 kilos, i.e. ten percent, you are not allowed to drive on. Then we prevent further travel. If we weigh the same crew and you go over 30 percent, i.e. over 975 kilos, that is grounds for revoking the driver’s license, says Richard Nilsson.
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Difficult to estimate the weight
Richard Nilsson points out that it is not about the police wanting to put ordinary people there.
– We are not looking to prevent people from tinkering in houses and gardens, but when you fill carts with gravel and soil, it is very easy for it to become too much, he says.
Instead, according to the traffic police, it is a question of road safety, as an overloaded smaller trailer can easily start to wobble already at 70 km/h. This, in turn, can lead to losing control of the car.
However, as a private person, making sure that the trailer is not too heavily loaded is not always the easiest thing to do.
– We who work with this are fully aware that the public does not have access to scales and we are not looking to chase fines. I still have to emphasize that no matter how you thought, calculated or planned your load, you as a driver are responsible for the weight our scales actually show on the road, that’s what the traffic regulations say, says Richard Nilsson.
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Source: nyheter24.se
