A Mount Ousley resident has called for urgent action to improve road safety along Mount Ousley Road after a truck rollover at Fairy Meadow on Wednesday.
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A driver lost control travelling east on the road, hitting a roundabout at the intersection of the Princes Highway and overturning near the McDonald's restaurant. The driver was trapped for about 40 minutes but no bystanders were injured. In 2006, a truck crashed into the same McDonald's, injuring 13 people.
Sharralyn Robinson, who has lived on nearby Dumfries Avenue for 30 years, had been concerned a vehicle would plough into the fast-food restaurant since before it was built, writing a letter to Wollongong City Council in 1997 to outline her worries.
Mrs Robinson, whose husband is a retired truck driver, wants an arrester bed built further down the road so out-of-control trucks have an alternative to driving "straight through" McDonald's.
"It's not a case of it won't happen again, it's a case of when it's going to happen again," she said.
"We need to give him [the driver] an option and look at some sort of preventative measure.
"When this happened last time, it was conversation on people's lips, but then what? This time, I would like to see it as a major issue that state and local governments and Roads and Maritime Services put their heads together and look at prevention."
Truck driver Brett Hulley, who has been driving up and down the mountain for 26 years, said the existing safety ramp at the bottom of the road needed to be maintained more regularly to ensure it was effective.
"People who don't know the road and aren't in the right gear and are looking for a safety ramp, they might miss it," he said.
"We need to have these safety ramps maintained and maybe more flashing lights and signs to really grab people's attention."
A Roads and Maritime Services spokesman said they were looking at a range of potential measures to improve heavy vehicle safety on the M1 Princes Motorway due to the increase in traffic.
"Heavy vehicles travelling on the M1 Princes Motorway and on to Mount Ousley Road are restricted to 40km/h with point-to-point speed cameras recently installed to enforce this restriction and improve safety."
He said Mount Ousley Road would be closed from Saturday night so the RMS could carry out improvements, including road resurfacing, drain maintenance, guardrail repairs and the installation of larger speed limit signs.
