Blue Mountains City Council mayor Mark Greenhill wants to see much tougher penalties for heavy vehicles breaching weight and length limits on Old Bathurst Road.
Old Bathurst Road currently has a vehicle weight limit of 3.5 tonnes and length limit of 7.5 metres, with $227 fines for those breaching these limits. Greenhill wants to see this increase tenfold.
Greenhill’s comments follow another incident on the road earlier this week.
On Monday (July 29), concrete was found spilled on Old Bathurst Road, which the council says resulted in slippery unsafe conditions on the bends and sparked a significant clean-up operation.
Previously, digital signage was in place to warn truck drivers not to use the road.
However, this was removed from the bottom of the hill by Penrith City Council after they installed large static warning signs to deter oversize vehicles from breaching weight and length limits for the road.
Blue Mountains City Council says it is now hoping for a meeting with Penrith City Council, Transport for NSW and NSW Police to review Old Bathurst Road safety issues and identify the best ways to prevent oversized vehicles from using Old Bathurst Road.
Greenhill said drivers who broke similar weight and height rules at Galston Gorge in the Hornsby Local Government Area faced far greater penalties.
“If you drive an overweight or oversized vehicle in Galston Gorge, you face a significantly higher fine of $2818,” he said.
“This has been an ongoing situation for many years, and obviously the current fine is not acting as a deterrent for drivers who don’t mind flouting the rules on this very steep and winding road.
“There should be no difference between breaking the rules in Hornsby and breaking them in the Blue Mountains.”
Greenhill took a Notice of Motion to yesterday’s council meeting, for this issue to be further addressed and enforced as a priority, including seeking support for the higher penalty for oversized trucks using Old Bathurst Road from NSW Transport Minister Joanna Haylen and Blue Mountains MP Trish Doyle.
“Council has long-standing concerns about the movement of heavy vehicles through the Blue Mountains; I said five years ago the situation on Old Bathurst Road is a fatality waiting to happen,” added Greenhill.
“We need to make sure we are doing everything we can to ensure safety on our roads.”
How does a council come up with a fine of $2818 for being on old Bathurst rd ?
It’s simple really don’t deliver to anyone up that road or double the freight rate for that area , watch the residents rip it into Mr Greenhill then . Why is everything based on fines nowadays if it’s a problem put some barriers up that only cars can get through or some other proactive measure to stop them going up there, if trucks carn’t get up there problem solved , do the job your
Paid to do instead of making another council cash cow
As a longtime resident of the area, the answer to your questions are:
1) This isn’t a one way street that these trucks are trying to make deliveries along or something and it’s certainly not the only route up the mountain. There is nowhere on either end of this stretch of road that requires this type of truck to go this way – that’s the point. The other way via the Great Western Highway is much safer and only takes 5-10 minutes longer depending on where you’re coming from or heading to, if that, considering the highway has a speed limit of 80km vs 50km on Old Bathurst (it’s 55km faster if you consider that the recommended speed for this road for CARS is 25km).
2) A physical barrier could only deter tall trucks and not necessarily long and/or heavy ones. How would you propose designing a physical barrier against a long and/or heavy truck that wasn’t taller than your average suv?
3) They came up with $2818 because these trucks cost thousands in cleanup when they either get stuck with a wheel off the ground trying to go up around the 30° slope of the virtually U-turn bends with sharp drops and near cliff faces on either side of this road or they wear out their brakes going around them when heading downhill and become unable to stop and end up running off the side of the road whether the cars in front of them can manage to get out of their path in time with nowhere to go but into oncoming traffic or not (this has happened before and I myself have had to stop to let someone who was oncoming to me come into the lane in front of me so they could get out of the way before. That was not even the scariest incident I’ve had). Cranes and clean up crews then have to be brought in to remove the truck and clear any spills costing what must range between a couple of thousand up to tens of thousands of dollars each time.
4) The residents are all for it as the only trucks to be excluded are those that are long and heavy enough to be dangerous, which most certainly aren’t the type of trucks that would normally be heading into this entirely residential area. We’re all sick of having to deal with the blocking and closing of this road for cleanup all the time alongside the fact that it’s definitely not an exaggeration that these long/heavy trucks taking this road could very well kill someone, and being residents that means we’re at much higher risk because we use the road all the time. I have literally never heard a local argue that they should be allowed to use this road.
This isn’t a cash-grab. This is just a reasonable attempt to cover a small part of the cost of the cleanups, chaos and danger these truck drivers cause and prevent dangerous decisions when they refuse to listen to the all the warning signs.