Natal, Brazil · Heavy vehicle ban
Official name Proibição do trânsito de caminhões nas vias de tráfego intenso
In force in Natal right nowTuesday, 13 October 2026 at 06:04 · America/Fortaleza
Lifts Tuesday, 13 October 2026 at 20:00 local time.
This schedule encodes Decreto nº 10.670/2015, which is the only instrument that names a street. It does not encode Lei Ordinária nº 6.619/2016, which since June 2016 has restricted lorries over 8 tonnes at 06:00–09:00 and 17:00–20:00 instead, over streets a further decree was supposed to define and never did. Inside 05:00–20:00 on a weekday the encoded window covers both readings. Outside it, one gap is left open on purpose and named in hours: the 2016 text carries no day-of-week limit, so a vehicle over 8 tonnes could in principle be caught at 17:00–20:00 on a Saturday, and this schedule shows those avenues as open.
The area is five avenues rather than an enclosed zone, so a proximity warning drawn from the city anchor will over-warn on every street between them. That is the safe direction and it is deliberate, but it means "restricted in Natal" is a coarser statement here than in the perimeter schemes of Curitiba, Goiânia or Campinas.
There is no public-holiday clause, because none of the three instruments states one, and this is the fourteenth Brazilian record running without a sourced Brazilian holiday calendar. The direction of the error is unknown rather than merely unencoded: São Paulo's equivalent scheme excepts holidays by name and Salvador's does not.
Saturday and Sunday are shown as unrestricted because the decree says "de segunda-feira a sexta-feira" and says nothing else about them. The 2008 law it implements says the same. Only the 2016 amendment is silent on days, and it is the instrument that names no roads.
The 05:00 start is early enough to be missed. A lorry that would clear the centre before the morning peak in most Brazilian cities is already inside this restriction — Campinas and Goiânia both start at 06:00 or 07:00, and Natal starts an hour or two before either.
Operating times only, read from the source below. It does not check your vehicle.
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.
Câmara Municipal de Natal, SAPL (Sistema de Apoio ao Processo Legislativo) — the register entry for Lei Ordinária nº 6.619 of 2 June 2016, the act that amended the scheme. This is the only channel in Natal that serves a municipal instrument as text on a URL a monitor can fetch, and its ementa states the scheme in the publisher's own words. The register's "Data Fim Vigência" field for this act is empty, which is the publisher's own machine-readable statement that it has not expired
There is no charge for entering, and unlike Campinas there is not even a priced permit to record instead. This is a prohibition: nothing Natal publishes offers a toll, a day pass or a payable entry that would buy a lorry over 5 tonnes onto these five avenues between 05:00 and 20:00. The one instrument that could have carried a price is the Autorização de Tráfego Especial, which Art.
4º of Decreto nº 10.670/2015 ordered the transport authority to create by portaria within 30 days of publication and which the driver of an excepted vehicle must carry. It was never published.
The phrase "Tráfego Especial" appears in the municipal gazette's full-text index in exactly two issues across its whole 2003–2026 run — 27 April 2015 and 8 May 2015 — and both are the decree itself, first published and then republished for incorrectness.
So the permit that the exemptions depend on has no published form, no published fee and no published application route, and this field is empty because there is no money in the scheme at all rather than because we could not find the figure.
Monday to Friday, 05:00 to 20:00. Fifteen hours of every working day, which is the longest weekday closure of any Brazilian scheme in this corpus — longer than Campinas's fourteen and Goiânia's twelve — and it starts at five in the morning, which is earlier than any of them. Saturday and Sunday carry no restriction.
That timetable comes from Art.
1º of Decreto nº 10.670/2015, which states it in the same sentence as the weight and the five avenues: "Fica proibido o trânsito, a parada e o estacionamento de veículos pesados e caminhões que tenham peso superior a 05 (cinco) toneladas, no período compreendido entre 05h00 e 20h00, de segunda-feira a sexta-feira". ⚠️ The law that decree implements now says something different, and this record encodes the decree.
Lei Ordinária nº 6.619 of 2 June 2016 replaced Art. 1º of Lei Promulgada nº 0256/2008 with a rule that bites at two peaks only — "no horário compreendido entre as 06h00min (seis horas) e 09h00min (nove horas) e as 17h00min (dezessete horas) e 20h00min (vinte horas)" — for lorries over 8 rather than 5 tonnes, on streets "a serem definidas e regulamentadas por Decreto".
The decree that would have defined them was never published, so the 2016 law names no street and cannot be obeyed on its own, while the 2015 decree names five and was never withdrawn. Where the two windows overlap, obeying the decree obeys both.
The one place it does not is the weekend: the 2016 replacement text dropped the words "de segunda a sexta-feira" that both the 2008 law and the 2015 decree carry, and read strictly it therefore runs every day.
Only the decree names the roads and the decree is weekdays-only, so that is what is encoded here — but a driver over 8 tonnes on one of these five avenues at 18:00 on a Saturday is in the one gap this record does not close. There is no public-holiday clause in any of the three instruments.
Prefeitura Municipal do Natal — Decreto nº 10.670 de 24 de abril de 2015, "Regulamenta a Lei Municipal n.º 0256, de 10 de junho de 2008, que proíbe o trânsito de caminhões nas ruas de tráfego intenso do Município de Natal", as republished in the Diário Oficial do Município of 8 May 2015 (Ano XV, nº 3023, pages 1–2) under the gazette's own "*Republicado por incorreção" mark. The republication is the authoritative text rather than the first printing of 27 April 2015: it restores a CONSIDERANDO clause that the first printing cut off mid-sentence, and it adds a paragraph to Art. 1º naming the Secretaria Municipal de Mobilidade Urbana as the enforcing body. Articles 1 to 8 are otherwise identical in the two printings, which were compared line by line. ⚠️ Unwatchable by design (D-077): this is a scanned-layout PDF and carries no verify_contains, so the monitor can confirm only that the gazette still serves the file. The city's own full-text search over the gazette would be watchable and is not, because it accepts POST only — the same query as a GET returns the empty form
Five named avenues, not an enclosed zone. Avenida Senador Salgado Filho together with Avenida Hermes da Fonseca — the decree writes them as one continuous corridor, "avenidas Senador Salgado Filho/Hermes da Fonseca" — then Avenida Prudente de Morais, Avenida Bernardo Vieira, Avenida Coronel Estevam and Avenida Rio Branco.
Between them these are the main north–south and centre–south arteries of Natal: Salgado Filho/Hermes da Fonseca is the airport-to-centre spine through Lagoa Nova, Tirol and Petrópolis, Prudente de Morais and Bernardo Vieira run parallel to it, Rio Branco is the old commercial street of the Cidade Alta, and Coronel Estevam runs west through Alecrim.
A lorry is inside the scheme only while it is on one of those roads; the blocks between them are untouched, which makes this a corridor restriction rather than the perimeter schemes of Curitiba, Goiânia or Campinas, and it means a competent detour is usually short. The decree gives no start point, no end point and no junction for any of the five, so the whole length of each is treated as restricted.
It also gives no map, no annex and no coordinate. ⚠️ Read the names carefully rather than trusting the shape: the restriction is over the avenues, and OpenStreetMap holds a Travessa Senador Salgado Filho, a Rua Hermes da Fonseca, a Rua Prudente de Morais, a Rua Rio Branco, a Travessa Coronel Estevam and a separate Avenida Coronel Estevam Moura within the same city, none of which the decree names.
Only "Bernardo Vieira" resolves to exactly one road. That is why no polygon was drawn from these names, and it is the same D-082 trap that stopped one being drawn in Goiânia and Campinas.
Prefeitura Municipal do Natal — Decreto nº 10.670 de 24 de abril de 2015, Art. 1º, in the Diário Oficial do Município of 8 May 2015 (Ano XV, nº 3023): "…nas avenidas Senador Salgado Filho/Hermes da Fonseca, avenida Prudente de Morais, avenida Bernardo Vieira, avenida Coronel Estevam e avenida Rio Branco". This is the only text in any reachable Natal channel that names a single street the scheme applies to. The 2016 amendment to the parent law explicitly left the street list to a future decree and that decree was never published, so there is no later list to prefer and no earlier one to compare against — Lei Promulgada nº 0256/2008 spoke only of "artérias de tráfego intenso" and named none. ⚠️ Unwatchable (D-077): scanned-layout gazette PDF
There is no emission standard to meet. The scheme sorts vehicles by weight, by size and by the job they are doing, and by nothing else. No Euro class, PROCONVE phase, fuel type, engine or registration year appears in Lei Promulgada nº 0256/2008, in Decreto nº 10.670/2015 or in Lei Ordinária nº 6.619/2016.
A new electric lorry over 5 tonnes is as restricted as a twenty-year-old diesel one. Air quality is not offered as a motive either: the decree's stated reason is the need to reconcile pedestrian, public-transport, freight and private-car flows on arterial roads carrying heavy traffic.
Not applicable, for the same reason as the petrol standard: fuel is never mentioned. What Natal tests instead of the engine is the load and the trade. Art.
5º of the decree sets the physical test for every excepted vehicle — 8 tonnes, 2.20 m maximum width and 7 m maximum length, measured bumper to bumper and at the widest point of the body, with mirrors, tow hitches, rubber buffers and catches not counted — and Art. 3º sets the trade test, listing perishable food, essential public services and a closed list of local jobs by name.
No amount is published, and this is the ordinary Brazilian case rather than a gap in the search. Decreto nº 10.670/2015 mentions a penalty exactly once, in the sole paragraph of Art. 4º, and only for the driver of an excepted vehicle who cannot produce the special authorisation: that driver "será autuado de acordo com a penalidade correspondente prevista no Código de Trânsito Brasileiro".
It names no article of the federal code, no infraction class, no sum and no licence points, so under D-053 there is nothing to encode — we do not pick a class out of the national fine table and price it ourselves. The parent law is emptier still: Lei Promulgada nº 0256/2008 has three articles, of which the 2016 amendment replaced the first two, and the surviving third is only the commencement clause.
There is no penalty article in the law at all. This is not the São Paulo, Salvador, Fortaleza, Recife, Manaus or Campinas exception, where the authority itself printed the class, the amount and the points in one sentence; no Natal channel does that for this scheme. ⚠️ The decree also mis-cites the code it defers to, calling it "Lei Federal nº 9.509, de 23 de setembro de 1997" in Art.
4º while citing the same statute correctly as nº 9.503 in its own opening recital — the Código de Trânsito Brasileiro is 9.503/1997. The error survived the republication for incorrectness unchanged.
Prefeitura Municipal do Natal — Decreto nº 10.670 de 24 de abril de 2015, Articles 1 to 8, in the Diário Oficial do Município of 8 May 2015 (Ano XV, nº 3023). Every exemption, every list, every dimension and the enforcement authority come from this text and nowhere else. The contested weight band and the two-peak timetable come from Lei Ordinária nº 6.619 of 2 June 2016, published in the gazette of 3 June 2016 and held as text in the Câmara Municipal's SAPL register at https://sapl.natal.rn.leg.br/norma/8668. ⚠️ Unwatchable (D-077): scanned-layout gazette PDF
Câmara Municipal de Natal, SAPL — the register entry for Lei Ordinária nº 6.619 of 2 June 2016, which amended Lei Promulgada nº 0256/2008. The only Natal instrument served as fetchable text rather than as a scanned gazette page, and therefore the only watchable statement of this scheme anywhere. Its ementa carries the scheme's original description and hours, its "Data Fim Vigência" field is empty, and it links the signed PDF at /media/sapl/public/normajuridica/2016/8668/lei06619-16.pdf, whose text was read in full and matches the gazette printing of 3 June 2016 word for word
Câmara Municipal de Natal, SAPL REST API — the municipal law register queried for every norm whose summary mentions instrument 0256, newest first. This source is watched as a change detector rather than for its prose. The register holds 9,338 municipal norms and answers 0 to the control word qqzzxxw; asked for "0256" it returns exactly 2, the twin records of the June 2016 amendment (the act itself as Lei Ordinária nº 6.619 and the same text filed again under its bill number as nº 115). If Natal's council amends, repeals or replaces this scheme, that total moves and the record falls out of the index. The same register is what settles that nothing has repealed it: it holds 44 norms whose summary contains "revoga" and 6 containing "suspende", so it demonstrably indexes repeals, and none of the 50 names Lei Promulgada nº 0256/2008 or Lei Ordinária nº 6.619/2016. ⚠️ The API escapes every non-ASCII character as \uXXXX while the HTML page on the same host does not, so the watched strings here are the bytes the endpoint ships (the D-054 shape); forward slashes are left alone, unlike Campinas
Prefeitura Municipal do Natal — Diário Oficial do Município of 8 May 2015 (Ano XV, nº 3023), carrying Decreto nº 10.670 de 24 de abril de 2015 republished for incorrectness. The operative instrument of this whole record: the only text that names the five avenues, and the source of the 5-tonne threshold, the 05:00–20:00 weekday window, the ban on stopping and parking as well as driving, the VUC exclusion, all four exception categories with their lists, the 8 t / 2.20 m / 7 m limits on excepted vehicles, the public-transport exemption, the 90-day adaptation period and the enforcement authority. Compared line by line against the first printing of 27 April 2015 (dom_20150427.pdf): Articles 1 to 8 are identical, the republication restores a recital the first printing truncated mid-sentence, and it adds the sole paragraph of Art. 1º naming the Secretaria Municipal de Mobilidade Urbana as responsible for enforcement. ⚠️ Unwatchable (D-077)
Prefeitura Municipal do Natal — Diário Oficial do Município of 13 June 2008 (Ano VIII, nº 1372), carrying Lei Promulgada nº 0256/2008 in full: the act that created the scheme at 5 tonnes, 05:00 to 20:00, Monday to Friday, over "artérias de tráfego intenso" it did not name, with 120 days for the then transit authority to define them. It is cited for one thing the later instruments cannot show — that the law has only three articles and that the third is the commencement clause, so no penalty was ever legislated. ⚠️ It also shows that the publisher's own printed text of Art. 1º is defective: "Fica proibia, a critério com peso superior 05 (cinco) toneladas, nas artérias de tráfego intenso" is missing its subject, and only the act's own summary line supplies the words "o trânsito de caminhões". The gazette's full-text index lists this issue for the phrase "tráfego intenso" and the served PDF carries that phrase where the index says it does; the passage quoted here was read directly out of the file. ⚠️ Unwatchable (D-077)
Prefeitura Municipal do Natal — Diário Oficial do Município of 3 June 2016 (Ano XVI, nº 3305), carrying Lei Ordinária nº 6.619 de 2 de junho de 2016 as published. The third independent channel for the same amendment, after the two SAPL records, and the one that fixes its publication date. It is the source for the contested 8-tonne threshold, the two peak windows, the instruction that the streets be defined by a further decree within 120 days, and the special-authorisation ceiling of 14 tonnes and 14 metres for removal lorries and special loads. ⚠️ Unwatchable (D-077)
Prefeitura Municipal do Natal — Diário Oficial do Município of 15 June 2022 (Ano XXII, nº 4922), carrying Decreto nº 12.540 de 14 de junho de 2022, which instituted the Plano Municipal de Mobilidade Urbana (PlanMob) and took effect on publication. This is the currency evidence, and it is the strongest kind available in Natal: the head of the executive, in a decree still in force, lists as the first strategic action of the urban-freight programme "Efetivação das regras previstas na Lei Promulgada nº 256/2008 e no Decreto nº 10.670/2015, que proíbe o trânsito de caminhões nas ruas de tráfego intenso do Município, assim como a ampliação de tal controle". The mayor names both instruments of this record together, in the present tense, as rules to be enforced and extended — the Goiânia shape, where an act of the head of the executive leans on the rule, rather than an enforcement counter or a fine ledger, neither of which Natal publishes. ⚠️ Unwatchable (D-077)
Next scheduled re-check: 2026-12-13.