BLACK SPOT MUST GO

BY LYNTON GRACE

A bend on the Newell Highway near Peak Hill must be removed after it caused two truck accidents earlier this year, according to Dubbo MP Dawn Fardell.
Mrs Fardell has told NSW Parliament two B-doubles tipped in the space of two weeks on the same bend at Hallinan’s Creek, between Peak Hill and Alectown.
She said local police had told her they were forced to “hug the middle line” in order to take the bend safely.
“That accident was not caused by bad driving but rather, was attributed to the bend in the road,” Mrs Fardell told Parliament.
She was pulled over for a breath-test when driving from Parkes to Dubbo, and the police officer told her at the time how police are forced to deal with the bend.
“The highway patrol officer told me that when he is driving a police vehicle there, he has to hug the middle line to take the bend safely because of the camber of the road,” she said.
“On the outside of the bend there are potholes and the grade is sloped the wrong way.”
Mrs Fardell has asked the RTA to remove the bend to solve the problem.
“Those two incidents would have been recorded in Roads and Traffic Authority statistics as truck incidents,” she told Parliament. “Neither was the fault of the truck driver. The fault lies in the construction of the road, and the highway patrol officer agrees with me.”
The RTA did not respond by the time of gonig to print.
One of accidents occurred in early April, when a 57-year-old Victoria man lost control of his B-double and it flipped on its side. The highway was completely blocked for hours.
Mrs Fardell brought up the bend in the road as she spoke against the state government’s changes to road transport laws.
“(The legislation) shows no consideration whatsoever for people involved in the heavy vehicle industry,” she said.
She told Parliament that under the legislation, a driver stuck in roadworks could be penalised simply for being stuck.
The government is proposing a stepped rate of penalties for every 15 minutes a driver is caught driving over their accredited 12-hour or 14-hour limit.
“If a driver is delayed by roadworks or an accident on the Newell Highway for longer than the proposed… period, he or she is not assisted by the inadequate number of recognised rest areas to pull over,” she said.
“The Newell Highway does not have enough rest areas to allow truckies their time out. Of course, those drivers then get pinged if they do not arrive at their destination by the specified time.”