Brazil: 1 scheme to know about before you drive in.
Manaus has one driving restriction on our books: the Zona Máxima de Restrição (ZMR) (heavy vehicle ban). What is a heavy vehicle ban?
Sources last read on 2026-09-13, from the authorities' own pages. The next scheduled check is 2026-12-12.
Manaus keeps heavy goods vehicles off its main central avenues for most of the working day, and it sorts them by gross weight on two different clocks.
The Instituto Municipal de Mobilidade Urbana (IMMU), the municipal traffic authority, states the rule in its own words: a vehicle whose Peso Bruto Total is over 8 tonnes may not circulate between 06:00 and 09:00 or between 17:00 and 20:00, and a lorry over 16 tonnes may not circulate between 09:00 and 17:00, Monday to Friday.
Read together, the two windows join up: anything over 16 tonnes is shut out from 06:00 to 20:00 without a break, while a vehicle between 8 and 16 tonnes loses only the two peaks and may work the middle of the day. Outside those hours, and at any hour on a Saturday or Sunday, the IMMU states nothing restricts the zone.
The way out is a permit rather than a payment — an Autorização Especial de Tráfego, applied for in person at the IMMU's counter on Avenida Urucará and granted or refused by its engineering directorate — and the way it goes wrong is priced by the authority itself: a grave infraction under the federal traffic code, R$ 195,23, five licence points and retention of the vehicle.
What this record does not have is an instrument. No decree or portaria for the ZMR is obtainable through any channel the municipality offers, and that is measured rather than assumed.
What stands in its place is the publisher saying so repeatedly, recently and in the present tense, and counting its own enforcement while it does: 202 citations in 2023, 554 in 2024, an operation on Avenida Mário Ypiranga Monteiro in March 2026 that cited 24 lorries in a morning, and a July 2026 consultation paper that opens by stating the zone is already in force before proposing to extend it.