Responding to the news of gridlocked traffic on May 10, Auckland Mayoral candidate David Hay says that the Penrose overbridge on the Southern Motorway needs rebuilding as a matter of urgency. Hay also says that under-pressure truck drivers cannot be expected to remember that one bridge on the Auckland motorway network is an exception to the others.
He has called on the Transport Minister, Simon Bridges to make rebuilding the Penrose overbridge a priority.
Hay says the Penrose overbridge was built lower than all the other bridges on the Auckland motorway system.
That was a mistake which needed rectification many years ago,” he says.
“That bridge has been hit six times in the past eighteen months. We don’t hear of other bridges on the motorway system being hit by overheight loads,” he says.
“The truck driver whose overheight load hit the bridge yesterday was traveling southbound. Presumably, he had passed under other bridges – at Market Road, Ellerslie, and Greenlane before he hit the bridge at Penrose,” says Hay.
“There are two options for fixing this problem: one is to replace the Penrose overbridge bridge, to make it consistent with other bridges on the motorway system,” he says.
“The other option is to replace the existing overheight warning system with something more efficient, such as traffic lights,” says Hay
“It would be better to stop one lane, or even the whole motorway, completely for a few minutes than to have the motorway system compromised for hours every time an overheight load hits this bridge,” he says.
“You can’t expect a busy, hard-working truck driver, under pressure to get the job done, to remember that one particular bridge is an exception to the rule and needs to be approached differently to every other bridge on the motorway,” says Hay.
“You also can’t expect them to heed a warning system that is unique to a single place on the road network, to which a driver won’t automatically respond,” he says.
“I favour rebuilding the bridge, to make its load height consistent with the other bridges on the Auckland motorway system. If that doesn’t happen, we can expect to see this incident repeated and again,” says Hay.
