Today at 2:00 PM • Updated today at 2:38 PM
The temporary traffic lights on the N65 in Helvoirt are very tightly adjusted and this has been causing dangerous situations for weeks. Last Friday things went wrong again at the intersection when the 18-year-old daughter of Jos from Helvoirt crossed on her moped. She was hit by a car and broke her foot.
Jos receives a call from his daughter at work on Friday around a quarter to five in the afternoon that she has been hit by a car. “It scares the hell out of you,” says Jos. He drives directly to her from Oisterwijk.
Once we arrive, the police and ambulance are already on site. Jos’ daughter sits on the ground in shock and her moped stands at the intersection. She has to go to the hospital by ambulance. “She came from work and drove home. She follows the rules, so she waited politely at the first red traffic light,” Jos explains.
When the light turns green, she drives on. She lets off the gas at the central reservation, because the next traffic light is red. Soon that light also turns green and so she accelerates again. “The moment her front wheel enters the highway, she sees a white car. She looks back and then it was already too late.”
“I don’t understand why there hasn’t been a death there yet.”
It is quite a shock for Jos and his daughter, but also for the driver. He was driving a car with a dashcam. “I have seen the images. You see my daughter suddenly appear in front of him, but you also see that the driver really has green. Only my daughter says that she also had green.”
That’s why Jos went to the intersection with his son last weekend. “We signaled to each other when we had green. It went well for a long time, until we both got green at the same time. I really don’t understand why there have been no deaths there yet. It is very dangerous.”
What particularly bothers Jos is the response of the police on the spot. “The officer had seen the dashcam footage and said that it looks like my daughter is to blame, because the car was green,” says Jos. “You cannot make such a judgment without a full investigation, but it will be included in the police report.”
They haven’t heard from the police since. “My daughter is seriously shocked, her foot is broken and the moped is broken total loss. There is no one to make inquiries or provide aftercare.”
“It has to be safe, smooth and efficient.”
It is not the first time that things have gone wrong with the temporary traffic lights. At the beginning of June, a cyclist was hit by a truck. At the time, Omroep Brabant noted, just like Jos, that the traffic lights were adjusted very tightly.
If cyclists get the green light, traffic from Tilburg to Den Bosch will still travel through the intersection at 80 kilometers per hour. Dangerous situations regularly arise in the first seconds after the light turns red.
The leader of SamenLokaal called it ‘too crazy for words’. “You would expect that with temporary traffic lights there would be at least a second of leeway before other traffic turned green. In practice, this turns out not to be the case.”
According to Rijkswaterstaat, the temporary traffic lights are set the same as the old ones. “They have been set according to the guidelines. It must be safe, smooth and efficient,” a spokesperson said after the accident with the cyclist.
There are temporary traffic lights at the intersection due to construction work. Next Sunday they will be replaced by new traffic lights with adjusted settings, but that will be too late for Jos’ daughter.
