Was I lucky or what! I drove through the Northern Motorway into Auckland City on my way to the airport around 6:30 AM. The first I heard about the crash was reading a NZStuff story on Twitter after I finished my presentation to the Intergraph Forum in Christchurch.
It’s interesting in this day and age how few people know about some of the information resources available to them. I probably knew about it before a lot of Aucklanders did, at least the ones that weren’t already stuck in the chaos. NZStuff has a great info page on Twitter. They do repeat their ‘Tweets’ a bit too often for my liking, but I guess that’s how people find out about their service and so far they only have 75 people following their free service. Crazy. It’s a great way of catching the headlines. I catch the Tweets on my Blackberry and can click on the links for the rest of the story.
People aren’t yet used to going on the web to check out traffic information. The last time I was in the Netherlands, we used to check the traffic site on the net to see if there were any problems we need to detour around. The site is pretty old fashioned in it’s mapping technology, nothing like the web mapping on the AA Maps website.
You might well find it worth checking that site in future before heading into the traffic. If you had done that this morning if you left after 9 AM you would have known not to go into the city via the Northern Motorway and if you check it now you will see that after 8PM tonight they are going to close it again to finish the job that the truck driver did crashing into the overbridge this morning. I’m glad I managed to get on an earlier flight!
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