By Violet Li
A Cranbourne resident is calling out a “structurally compromised” intersection between Evans Road and South Gippsland Highway following her grandchild’s significant car collision.
Gail Davidson said her grandchild was driving north along the highway on 5 March at around 8pm when a man pulled out of the Evans Road intersection and tipped over her car. All the traffic lights were out at the intersection at the time of the accident.
“He hit her all in the left wheel. All the lights and all the fronts are mangled. And the tyres are all bent,” she said.
“The car was slid across the road. Eight to 10 people rushed over and slipped the car back on the wheels to make sure they could get her out.”
As the police investigation of the accident is ongoing, Ms Davidson said they were not putting any blame on anyone.
Ms Davidson would like to point out that the left-hand turn from Evans Roads into the highway was made ‘a little too severe’, which could create a blindspot to see the upcoming traffic.
“Before you turn left, and when you’re looking back, you can’t just turn your head. You have to turn more or less from your waist and your shoulder and look right back,” she said.
“You are nearly doing a 90-degree turn with your body to look back to see if there’s traffic coming.
“What I think they’ve done is to stop people just driving straight onto the highway, but they’ve made it a little too severe because you turn, and then you get a curve like you’re going to do a U-turn, and then you come back round to straighten up to head.”
The intersection at South Gippsland Highway, Hallam Road, and Evans Road was upgraded in 2020 with new traffic lights installed to improve safety.
Evans Road was also realigned with Hallam Road to create a cross-intersection with the highway.
Ms Davidson said she heard similar accidents happened at the intersection after the upgrade and her grandchild knew someone who ran into an accident at the same intersection only a few weeks ago.
“There was an upgrade there, and they got flashing lights, but there are still accidents there for some reason,” she said.
A Major Road Projects Victoria spokesperson said they had seen a massive reduction in crashes since completing the Hallam Road Upgrade.
The statistics they retrieved from the Department of Transport and Planning showed that in the 10 years before the completion of the upgrade, 23 crashes occurred along Hallam Road south of Ormond Road and at the South Gippsland Highway intersection.
Since the completion of the project in 2020, there had been one reported crash at this intersection, they said.
When contacted by Star News, Casey Council noted that the intersection of Evans Road and South Gippsland Highway was under the care and management of the Department of Transport and Planning.
It checked the State Government’s crash statistics database which confirmed six reported collisions had occurred at the intersection since the traffic signals were commissioned in the second half of 2020.
The council does not have access to the circumstances surrounding the most recent incident at this site and therefore unable to provide comment.
The discrepancy between the two databases could result from different ways to collect data or different definitions of car crashes.
