ANP Productions | Source: ANP
Friday, April 5, 2024 at 1:01 PM
Purmerend
The preparatory work on the A7 near Purmerend is not causing any traffic disruptions or crowds on the road on Friday morning, the ANWB reports. Rijkswaterstaat will be working in the coming evenings and nights to set up the new traffic situation on the bridge on the A7 over the Noordhollandsch Kanaal. Rijkswaterstaat will start strengthening the bridge on Monday.
As of Sunday morning, only half of the bridge will be available to traffic. Road users will then drive across four narrowed lanes with a maximum speed of 70 kilometers per hour. Rijkswaterstaat expects that this will not immediately cause any major problems on Sunday. During the night from Sunday to Monday, the final touches will be made to setting up the work site. Major traffic disruptions and crowds are expected from Monday, a Rijkswaterstaat spokesperson said. Then work on the bridge will begin, which will last five months.
Rijkswaterstaat emphasizes that the concerns that local residents have regarding the accessibility of the region due to the partial closure of the road are justified. “In principle you can continue to go anywhere. It may take longer, so take that into account in the travel time. That makes the project exciting, but we are not doing this for the first time.”
Emergency bridge
According to the spokesperson, it will be particularly busy in the first few days. “The first days are the getting used to days. Then you will see that it gets busy, then it stabilizes, then people know where to find their way and it becomes quieter. That is what we hope for in this case.”
Rijkswaterstaat will keep road users informed of the progress of the work via their social media accounts and websites, the spokesperson said. To prevent people from using shortcuts, a number of local roads are closed to through traffic during rush hour. “So that those roads are really only used by people who live there.”
A temporary bridge was not possible, says Rijkswaterstaat. “We are going to strengthen the bridge by drilling holes and filling them with steel. This has to be done from above. An emergency bridge has a lot of impact on the environment, such as a lot of preparation time, which means that freight traffic that has been detouring for a year and a half now has to take a detour even longer. The bridge must also connect to all roads around it. The nitrogen problem also plays a role. It is so complex that we saw no possibility of constructing an emergency bridge,” said the spokesperson.
