V-23 motorway accident disrupts access to Sagunto during rush hour
An accident on the V-23, at the exit lane toward Puerto de Sagunto, disrupted access to the town this Wednesday morning, according to Spain's traffic authority (DGT).
Drivers heading to Puerto de Sagunto on the V-23 this Wednesday ran into an unexpected obstacle from early morning: an accident at kilometre point 5.1, right on the exit ramp toward the port area, which Spain's traffic authority (DGT) kept marked with the right-hand lane closed from 6:08am, well into the morning commute.
The closure coincided with the busiest time for people working in the industrial estate and the large companies based near the port, adding extra queues right at the entrance to the town during the peak of the morning rush. A few kilometres away, on the N-340, a broken-down vehicle also blocked part of the road in the decreasing direction from 7:22am, while roadworks kept a single lane active on another stretch of that same road, as they have since 1 September.
The morning was, in fact, especially busy across the whole province: the DGT was also logging delays on the CV-35 near Llíria, on the northern and southern approaches to the city of Valencia itself, and on several stretches of the A-7 and A-3 motorways. None of those other spots directly affects the Camp de Morvedre district, but they help explain why traffic across the wider province moved noticeably more slowly than usual that morning while the Sagunto incident was being cleared.
Isolated incidents like this one are also landing at a time of sustained growth in traffic on the V-23: the arrival of new industrial plants, including the PowerCo battery gigafactory, a Volkswagen Group subsidiary, and of the hundreds of workers linked to bringing it online, has added pressure to Sagunto's access roads in recent months, particularly during shift-change hours.
The V-23, together with the A-23, is one of the town's most sensitive access roads: it carries much of the traffic for people working at the industrial estate and the large companies based in that part of Sagunto, plus the daily commute to the port area. Any incident on that stretch, however small, tends to show up quickly as queues, precisely because there are not many direct alternative routes to Puerto de Sagunto at that time of the morning. Council services have spent months warning that the estate's growth will sooner or later force a review of how much traffic those access roads can handle, although any expansion of the road network depends on authorities above the municipal level and usually takes several years to deliver.
Beyond this Wednesday's particular closure, people who live or work in the Sagunto area know from experience that how reliable this single main access road is shapes much of their daily routine: a simple broken-down vehicle or a minor accident is enough to throw off the schedule of hundreds of workers, something that rarely happens with the same intensity in towns that have a more branched, better-connected road network to fall back on. For those with no alternative to driving, that reliability directly affects punctuality at work: many companies on the industrial estate run shifts with very little slack, so a simple fifteen- or twenty-minute delay at the access point can affect an entire plant's output, not just the person behind the wheel.
The DGT has not said whether anyone was injured in the V-23 accident or given a firm estimate of when the link to the port will be fully cleared. As with any lane closure, emergency services remind drivers that using the hard shoulder to avoid the queue makes it harder for ambulances and patrol cars to reach the affected spot, a reminder they repeat often, even though it is not always followed in practice. According to El Periódico de Aquí.
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