Beaumont Bridge users should have minimal delays getting across the Central Otago bridge over Christmas and New Year, after improvements to phasing and a live monitor link to a transport operations centre has been set up. 

Waka Kotahi NZTA journey manager Nicole Felts said the traffic signals which control access to the old, single lane bridge did road users no favours at Labour Weekend.

Queues formed with lengthy delays when the traffic signal sequencing developed a fault. A traffic manager came to the site to clear the backlog to Raes Junction.

 “Since then the traffic light system has been phased differently to reduce the number of signals and we have a live monitor linking to our transport operations centre operators so they can manually adjust the signals if there are significant traffic flows in one direction over another,” Nicole said. 

People still need to bear in mind that a single lane bridge on busy days will be a traffic pinch point and they may face a short wait of a few minutes for the green light.

Vehicles on the new eastern embankment road as work crews at Beaumont plug the gap between the embankment and the new eastern bridge abutment

Work at the new bridge will be paused from December 22 until January 9. 

From January 16 there will be a full dig-out of the old road past the Beaumont Hotel with a detour onto Dee and Westferry Streets for SH8 users. All vehicles can use the detour including overweight and over-dimension trucks and trailers.

If you are on the roads over the holidays use the Waka Kotahi holiday hotspots tool to plan your trip to avoid peak traffic.

The Central App keeps the Roads button up to date, access this by clicking on ’Reports’ on the main menu of the app.