BQE Weight Crackdown Expands to Williamsburg Bridge

By Y.M. Lowy

The city is stepping up efforts to protect aging infrastructure, with the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and the Williamsburg Bridge now part of the upgrades.

Starting this Sunday, trucks on the BQE will face automatic fines if they are too heavy. The Department of Transportation is using built-in road sensors to catch and ticket overweight vehicles. Each violation will cost $650.

This system, called weigh in motion, has already been in use for Queens bound traffic. Since it launched last year, the number of overweight trucks on the BQE’s triple cantilever dropped by sixty percent.

Other sites getting weigh in motion sensors include the Bear Mountain Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, Queensboro Bridge, and more across all five boroughs. The goal is to reduce long term damage to critical roadways and prevent costly repairs.

The sensors work by weighing vehicles as they pass over the road, using cameras to identify trucks that exceed the legal limit. The technology allows for violations to be tracked in real time without stopping traffic.