A truck driver in Kinding in the Upper Bavarian district of Eichstätt chose a bad route: In order to avoid a blockade at a roundabout, the 62-year-old rumbled over a bicycle bridge with his vehicle, which weighs several tons, as the police announced on Sunday. After that, however, he couldn’t get any further: he ended up in a dead end.
While driving on the shoulder, the vehicle ultimately sank so deeply into the mud that it had to be pulled out by a special vehicle in a complex and time-consuming rescue operation. To do this, a six-meter-long guardrail also had to be dismantled. The man was driving his 7.5-ton truck to deliver goods for a postal service manager. “He thought he would get through,” explained a police spokesman. Of course, there would have been an official diversion – that would have been “a five-minute detour,” said the police spokesman. But now it took the driver nine hours: he got stuck at five in the morning and was able to continue his journey at around 2 p.m. The detour over the cycle bridge also probably cost him 100 euros – according to the police, this is about the same as the fine for driving on cycle paths with motor vehicles. The freshly paved cycle path next to the state road from Kinding towards Beilngries had just been built and opened a few weeks ago, the police said. Now a structural engineer has to check the bridge.