Brazil: 1 scheme to know about before you drive in.
Natal has one driving restriction on our books: the Proibição do trânsito de caminhões nas vias de tráfego intenso (heavy vehicle ban). What is a heavy vehicle ban?
Sources last read on 2026-09-14, from the authorities' own pages. The next scheduled check is 2026-12-13.
Natal does not close an area to lorries; it closes five avenues. Heavy vehicles and lorries weighing more than 5 tonnes may not drive, stop or park on Avenida Senador Salgado Filho and its continuation Avenida Hermes da Fonseca, Avenida Prudente de Morais, Avenida Bernardo Vieira, Avenida Coronel Estevam or Avenida Rio Branco, from 05:00 to 20:00, Monday to Friday.
Those are the arterial spines of the south and centre of the city, so the rule is narrow on a map and hard to avoid in practice.
The Veículo Urbano de Carga is excluded outright, and lorries carrying perishable food, running an emergency, doing essential public works or on a short list of local jobs — press, hospital gases, LPG, breakdown recovery, concrete mixers and pumps, removals — are excepted, but the excepted ones must still stay under 8 tonnes, 2.20 metres wide and 7 metres long, and all except the emergency vehicles need prior authorisation from the transport authority. ⚠️ The weight figure is contested by the city's own instruments and this record encodes the stricter one.
The scheme was created by Lei Promulgada nº 0256/2008 at 5 tonnes and 05:00–20:00 on weekdays, and made real seven years later by Decreto nº 10.670 of 24 April 2015, which is the only text that ever names the five avenues.
Then in June 2016 the city council amended the law itself to bar lorries over 8 tonnes at two peaks only, 06:00–09:00 and 17:00–20:00, and instructed the transport authority to define the streets afresh by decree within 120 days.
No such decree was ever published: the gazette's own full-text index, searched over its whole 2003–2026 run, returns the phrase "tráfego intenso" in seven issues and not one of them falls between the 2016 amendment and today.
So the law says 8 tonnes at two peaks with no streets named, the decree says 5 tonnes all day on five named streets, and in June 2022 the mayor's Plano Municipal de Mobilidade Urbana listed both of them together as the rules to be "effectivated" and extended. Nothing here is priced.
The decree sends a breach to "the corresponding penalty in the Código de Trânsito Brasileiro" without naming an article, a sum or a licence point, and the law it implements has no penalty article at all — so this record carries no fine, unlike São Paulo, Salvador, Recife, Manaus or Campinas, where the authority printed the class and the amount itself.