Auckland Harbour Bridge: Traffic building to another day of long delays

8:11 am on 22 September 2020

Traffic into Auckland's CBD city over the Harbour Bridge is heavy as commuters face another day of congested routes and closed lanes.

Traffic along the Northern Motorway on Tuesday morning

Photo: NZTA

Four of the bridge's eight lanes are closed, and may be for weeks, after a truck hit by a gust of wind on Friday damaged a strut of the bridge's arch.

Traffic was heavy at 7am on SH1 citybound from Upper Harbour Highway while overall travel time via the western ring route (SH18/16/20) was similar, Waka Kotahi NZTA says.

Reduced lanes on the bridge are leading to heavy citybound traffic on State Highway 1 from Tristram Ave.

The NZTA real-time traffic tracker showed long travel times on citybound routes.

The agency is again advising people to work from home if possible.

The same plea yesterday resulted in 60 percent fewer southbound cars and 30 percent fewer northbound cars compared to the previous Monday, but motorists were still experiencing long delays.

Work on temporary repairs to the steel strut could start start tonight but a long-term solution remains weeks away.

If all goes to plan, NZTA is intending to shut the southbound lanes of the bridge from about 9pm, until 5am on Wednesday, and installation of a new piece of the strut is to take up to two nights.

The agency said it would not know the timeframe for certain until the teams got up there and understood the challenges of the repair work.

Northbound traffic will still have two lanes open and a detour route around the western ring route will be put in for southbound traffic.

Once the temporary fix is in place, rigourous testing will still have to be done before vehicles are allowed back onto two of the four lanes that are closed on the centre span - one in each direction.

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