Mayoral candidate David Hay said today that the Penrose overbridge on the Southern Motorway must be rebuilt as a matter of urgency. He has called on Hon. Simon Bridges, the Minister of Transport, to make this a priority.

Responding to the news that the Southern Motorway was gridlocked for hours on 10 May, Mr Hay said "The Penrose overbridge was built lower than all the other bridges on the Auckland motorway system. That was a mistake which should have been put right many years ago."

"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. The truck driver whose overheight load hit the bridge yesterday was travelling southbound. Presumably he had passed under other bridges - at Market Road, Ellerslie and Greenlane, before he hit the bridge at Penrose.

"There are really 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. The other is to replace the existing overheight warning system with something more effective, such as traffic lights. 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."

"I've held a heavy traffic licence for nearly 40 years and I understand how this sort of accident happens. 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. 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."

"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 again and again."

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