Another truck drove into the back of a truck standing on the emergency lane – the recording of the incident that took place on the A1 near Łódź went online. The road manager emphasizes that accidents related to ignoring the surroundings on expressways are becoming a deadly plague. – It has come to the point that our employees are afraid to carry out work despite the warning sign – says Maciej Zalewski, spokesman for the General Directorate for National Roads and Motorways in Łódź.
On Tuesday, on the A1 motorway, a second Volvo truck with a semi-trailer parked on the emergency lane drove into the back of a Scania truck. About the accident that took place between the Brzeziny and Łódź Północ junctions reported shortly after the incident. – A 39-year-old passenger of the Volvo and a 49-year-old passenger of the Scania were injured – reports junior midshipman Aneta Kotynia from the police in Koluszki.
You can see how the incident happened in a video that went viral shortly after the accident. The video was recorded by the video recorder of one of the cars going in the opposite direction.
As determined by the police, the driver of the Volvo did not keep a safe distance between the vehicles – emphasizes junior asp. Kotyn.
Two trucks collided on Highway 1TVN24
Arkadiusz Kuzio, director of the Academy of Road Safety in Szczecin and court expert in the field of road safety, informed about the problem of accidents in which vehicles parked on emergency lanes are hit. In the dedicated text Police Holiday Fatal Accident Map said that such cases are becoming more and more common. – As in the lens, however, it can be seen that the problem of fatigue and lack of attention takes a deadly toll – said the expert.
Blindly
Maciej Zalewski, spokesman for the General Directorate for National Roads and Motorways in Łódź, agrees with him in this respect. He emphasizes that – for some reason – emergency lanes on expressways are regularly the site of dangerous collisions and tragic accidents.
– It got to the point that our employees were afraid of performing tasks related to road maintenance. It is hardly surprising to them, because in the last six months we have not had a situation in which cars with an arrow warning about ongoing works were not hit. It can be seen even in poor visibility from a distance of several kilometers, so I don’t know how it can be explained – says Zalewski.
The interlocutor of tvn24.pl indicates that – in his opinion – users of highways routinely ignore their surroundings.
– For the safety of our employees, work related to, for example, painting stripes or mowing grass is performed during the day. At night, the vigilance of drivers is even worse – says Zalewski.
Recently, tvn24.pl informed about a truck with a semi-trailer that hit the back of a maintenance car that displayed a warning sign about ongoing work. Truck with a semi-trailer it flipped over and slid past the workers mowing the grass by the side of the road.
– I have extensive documentation of crushed vehicles. Several workers lost their lives. It’s all because of people who look at their phones while driving on the expressway, or who are doing God knows what, says Zalewski.
He emphasizes that services in other countries are trying to deal with a similar problem. He says that there are police motorcycle patrols on French highways that check whether drivers, for example, watch movies on mobile devices while driving.
Visible growth
Commissioner Kamil Wnukowski from the Provincial Police Headquarters in Łódź reports that accidents of hitting a car standing in the emergency lane are most often classified in statistics as events resulting from the perpetrator falling asleep or being tired.
Causes of accidents on highways caused by driversPolice Headquarters
– Expressways can be boring in the long run. The monotony makes drivers tend to pay less attention to their surroundings. And that can have dire consequences, he says.
The annual statistics prepared by the police show that in 2022, 43 accidents took place on Polish motorways due to the perpetrator’s fatigue or falling asleep (in 2021 there were 37 of them). As a result, 11 people died (two years ago there were three).
Main photo source: TVN24