The ban on overtaking by trucks would, according to the minister, improve road safety and smooth traffic. The Polish Government wants the new regulations to come into force as soon as possible, claiming it would improve road capacity, including during high traffic holiday periods.
The minister stressed in an interview with Polish Radio that so called “elephant races” are a “very dangerous” situation.
Interestingly, as highlighted by Dorota Ziemkowska from trans.iNFO’s Polish language service, the implementation of a truck overtaking ban represents something of a u-turn from the Polish Government.
Back in 2011, Rafał Weber, who was Infrastructure Minister at the time, maintained that there were no plans to introduce such a complete ban.
What’s more, Weber even stated that the impact of the ban may be undesirable, as in some cases it could lead to “deterioration of road safety by, for example, slowing down traffic, or repeated violations of the ban with the obvious need to overtake a vehicle moving at very low speed”.
The implementation of the overtaking ban also coincides with the Polish Government’s decision to scrap all motorway road tolls for passenger vehicles. The move comes just months before the country’s Parliamentary elections, sparking inevitable debate as to whether the decision is a pre-election bribe, culturally referred to in Poland as an “election sausage”.
Commenting on the fact that commercial vehicles will continue to pay for tolls while passenger vehicles are exempt, Maciej Wroński, President of the Employers’ Association Transport and Logistics Poland, said:
“The exemption of passenger cars from tolls will undoubtedly reduce the funding allocated to roads. We are concerned whether this will not have a negative impact on the development of the motorway and expressway network or cause the government to seek compensation for the lost revenues by increasing the tolls for vehicles used in road transport.”
Photo: Adrian Grycuk, CC BY-SA 3.0 PL, via Wikimedia Commons (image cropped)
