Recently we were marooned for two hours in a traffic jam on SH29, between Baypark and the Maungatapu Bridge, following a multiple-car accident.

The true difficulty of the situation, which has happened before, soon became apparent. The side of the road carrying traffic from the bridge to Baypark was empty, but while the centre road concrete traffic barriers obviously perform a necessary safety function, the consequence of their immobility is that every vehicle travelling west was trapped.

The mixture of cars, trucks and trailers meant that it was impossible for traffic to turn around on their side of the road and go back the way they came.

Has no-one in NZTA considered installing movable barriers at intervals along such stretches of road, just wide enough for a large vehicle to make a U-turn on to the other side of the road?

If an ambulance had been on an emergency trip to the hospital, it would have been trapped for two hours, and if a fire had broken out in a vehicle, there would have been nowhere to go.

D Goodyear, Welcome Bay