Less than an hour after the Tyroleans had started their usual truck block handling near Kufstein at 5 a.m. on Monday morning, something happened again that the Bavarian side of the border had been warned about again and again. The trucks waiting to enter Austria in the right-hand lane of the Inntal autobahn were already backing up behind Oberaudorf, but the driver of a small van realized this too late and drove into a slow truck.
After this serious accident, the Bavarian police blocked the motorway towards Innsbruck and diverted all cars through the towns of Brannenburg and Oberaudorf. However, the trucks had to remain on the autobahn this time, because the new Bavarian driving bans for transit trucks on the A 93 and A 8 autobahns applied for the first time during block handling on Monday.
The state government only presented these drive-through bans on Friday, which extend along the A 8 from Holzkirchen near Munich to the border with Salzburg. They only apply to trucks over 7.5 tons and only if the Tyroleans only allow all trucks that are waiting for entry after their various weekend and night driving bans to enter the country with a delay, because otherwise their road network would be overloaded. So far, the roads in the Bavarian Inn Valley have been particularly overloaded, where some truck drivers have been looking for shortcuts and usually only found the next traffic jam. But then there were also commuters, school buses, nursing services and, in the worst case, even ambulances.
27 kilometers of traffic jams
Because the federal motorway company did not want to close any exits so quickly, a whole series of district offices had to block the surrounding state and district roads for trucks heading to Austria instead. On Monday morning, the independent city of Rosenheim closed one last gap. The measure was generally staged as if the Tyroleans were really going to get even in the long-standing transit dispute. The neighbors, on the other hand, are rather pleased that the Bavarians have now got the message and are also relying on truck driving bans.
For the premiere on Monday, the trucks in Bavaria backed up in the top of Kiefersfelden over 27 kilometers back to the A8 at Rosenheim-West. That was around 11 a.m., when the Tyrolean block handling was already over for an hour. The traffic jam broke up accordingly by noon. According to the Bavarian police, more than 50 officers checked more than 600 trucks at the exits and sent around a tenth of them back onto the motorway because, according to the shipping documents, the destination was not somewhere in the towns on the A8 and A93 , but over in Austria or even further south on the other side of the Brenner Pass.
A driving ban for transit trucks, which the district office in Bad Reichenhall had issued for the so-called small German corner, applied throughout the day on Monday. This shortest connection between Salzburg and the Salzburger Pinzgau as well as parts of Tyrol leads straight through the district of Berchtesgadener Land. Residents in Bad Reichenhall and Schneizlreuth have recently complained again and again that a ban on truck driving for the Kleine Deutsche Eck is often ignored and hardly checked will. According to the current “dosing calendar” of the Tyrolean state government, the next block processing and thus the next Bavarian road closures will take place on October 4th.