Moldova
Cap in the app: 70 km/h.
Speed
70 km/h outside built-up areas, 90 km/h on a road signposted with indicator 5.4 (drum pentru automobile). The point does not say "caravan" but autoturisme … care tractează o remorcă — every car under 3,500 kg with a trailer, whatever the trailer is. Within built-up areas 50, with 30 at schools, hospitals, parks and historic town centres, 20 in residential zones and 5 in pedestrian zones. Without a trailer, 110 and 90 apply. Pct. 47 sets no separate figure for autostradă: the whole speed enumeration distinguishes only between a road signposted 5.4 and celelalte drumuri.
Source. Regulamentul circulaţiei rutiere, approved by HG nr. 357 din 13.05.2009, MO nr. 92-93 (3425-3426) of 2009-05-15, art. 409, pct. 47 sp. 2) lit. c). The built-up-area limits from sp. 1) lit. a) in the version given by HG nr. 642 din 14.09.2022 pkt 15 (MO nr. 291-296 (8335-8340) of 2022-09-23, art. 735)
Dimensions — the traffic regulation gives the width and height, the roads act the length
Moldova is the first country in this document where two of the figures stand in the traffic regulation itself. Every other country refers on to a technical regulation; here the width and the height stand in the text the driver is judged by, and only the length lies a step away.
The width and the height: RCR pct. 87. Section 10, Transportarea încărcăturilor:
87. Limitele maxime de gabarit ale vehiculelor (inclusiv încărcăturii) nu trebuie să depăşească: în lăţime – 2,55 m (pentru autocamioanele frigorifice şi caroseriile izotermice – 2,6 m); în înălţime – 4 m; în lungime – încărcătura să nu depăşească limita gabaritului posterior al vehiculului mai mult de 2 m.
The heading over the section is about loads, and it looks at first like a loading rule. The following point settles it: pct. 89 says "Vehiculele care, constructiv sau din cauza încărcăturii transportate, depăşesc limitele maxime de gabarit se pot deplasa pe drumurile publice numai fiind autorizate de administratorul drumului şi poliţia rutieră." A vehicle exceeding the dimensions by its construction is therefore caught by the same limit as an overloaded one — and construction is precisely what a caravan is too wide by. Pct. 87 is a vehicle limit. The figures have no addressee: they apply to vehiculelor, without a category enumeration and without a commercial reservation.
Two further rules belong with them. Pct. 89 makes exceeding them subject to a permit rather than prohibited, the same construction as Slovakia, and the permit must be given by both the road authority and the traffic police. Pct. 90 adds a prohibition that is easy to miss: "Este interzisă deplasarea vehiculelor cu limitele de gabarit depăşite, în condiţii de vizibilitate redusă sau polei" — a vehicle over the dimensions may not drive at all in reduced visibility or on black ice, permit or no permit.
The length: the roads act's annex. Codul transporturilor rutiere nr. 150/2014 art. 62¹ alin. (1) refers to "dimensiunilor maxime admise prevăzute în Legea drumurilor", and Legea drumurilor nr. 509-XIII din 22.06.1995 has the figures in anexa nr. 2. The annex was rewritten in its entirety by Legea nr. 118 din 25.05.2023 pct. 9 and has since contained a word-for-word transposition of Directive 96/53/EC annex I, which the act itself writes out in its harmonisation clause.
| Dimension | Moldova | Article |
|---|---|---|
| Width | 2.55 m (2.60 m with an insulated refrigerated body) | RCR pct. 87; Legea drumurilor anexa nr. 2 p. 1.2 |
| Height | 4.00 m | RCR pct. 87; anexa nr. 2 p. 1.3 a) |
| Length, vehicle | 12.00 m autovehicul, altul decât autobuzul; 12.00 m remorcă | anexa nr. 2 p. 1.1 |
| Length, outfit | 18.75 m tren rutier | anexa nr. 2 p. 1.1 |
The annex's length list is the directive's: vehicles other than buses 12.00, trailers 12.00, articulated vehicles 16.50, tren rutier 18.75, articulated buses 18.75, two-axle buses 13.50, buses with more axles 15.00, buses with trailers 18.75, car transporters 18.75 unladen and 20.75 laden. The turning space in p. 1.5 is 12.50 m outer and 5.30 m inner radius, and the partial dimensions in p. 1.6–1.8 are 12.00, 15.65 and 16.40.
That the caravan is caught follows from the regulation's own glossary, not from interpretation. RCR pct. 6 defines remorcă as "vehiculul destinat tractării de către un autovehicul" — every vehicle intended to be towed, without a goods requirement, and the caravan has no definition of its own that would take it out. The regulation knows the word rulotă-camping and uses it once, in pct. 83 e), which prohibits anyone from travelling in it. The combination also has a name of its own in pct. 6: "ansamblu de vehicule – garnitură formată dintr-un autovehicul tractor şi o remorcă sau semiremorcă, care circulă pe drumul public ca un tot întreg" — a towing vehicle plus a trailer, without the towing vehicle needing to be a goods vehicle. It is the same general wording that gave Montenegro 18.75 and that was missing in North Macedonia.
A weakness that must stay visible. Anexa nr. 2 does not define tren rutier and Legea drumurilor has no definitions article that does; the word stands only as the heading of a row in the table. That the row catches a caravan outfit therefore rests on the annex being a word-for-word transposition of the directive, where road train is the general term for a towing vehicle plus a trailer — not on a Moldovan definition. The width and height stand more firmly: they come from RCR pct. 87, which applies to every vehicle in traffic and needs no term at all.
Amendment position. Anexa nr. 2 in the version introduced on 2023-06-21 stands unchanged: a search issue by issue through the Monitorul Oficial from that day to 2026-08-08 gives no later amendment to Legea drumurilor. RCR pct. 86–91 have not been touched by any of the fifteen amending acts to HG 357/2009 that were retrieved.
Method note: a character table that did not exist, and an image route past it. The gazette issue with Legea nr. 118/2023 has the annex's table set in a /Type0 font with /Identity-H encoding without /ToUnicode, and the descendant font is /CIDFontType0 with /FontFile3 — CFF. Without a character table every digit in the table cells becomes a meaningless glyph code: the body text around it reads fine, the figures come out as rubbish. The font's /W array shows that the glyphs lie in the standard Macintosh order (gid 3 = 250, gid 8 = 833, gid 11–12 = 333, gid 19–28 = 500, gid 36 = 722), so decoding from the CFF table is entirely possible and is the proper solution — but it was not written here. Instead pages 6 and 7 were rendered as JPEG via the gazette's own page server (format=jpg, 1200×1697) and read as images, the same route as North Macedonia's scanned annex. The figures in the table above are therefore read off the page image of the printed gazette, which is the strongest form of evidence available, and the same method was used to check HG 642/2022 point 15 row by row.