Man Lifted Up Carpark Gantry Barrier By Hand & Broke It; HDB Says ‘Never Mind’

There’s a multitude of annoying nuisances in this world; mosquitoes, sandflies, cockroaches… etc. etc.

But none, in my very unbiased opinion, comes close to those annoying ass wipes:

Gantry barriers.

Taking an extraordinarily long time to shift up and down every single time, these damn boards seem insistent on wasting our time day in day out. And to make things worse, they have the audacity to freeze on us.

Like really?

Of course, thereafter, you can always call in the service provider for help. But what if…

They advise you to open the barrier, not by controls, but manually?

And what if you try to open it, and it…

Breaks?

Unlucky max? Because that’s what happened to this guy.

What happened?

In a video shared by Facebook page Roads.sg on 18 Oct, the man could be spotted standing in front of a car park gantry barrier. After checking to see whether the barrier would open, he looks back, before proceeding to lift the barrier with his hands.

The barrier stays upright for a second, and he turns around to walk back to his car. Mission accomplished! was probably what he was thinking; until the world came crashing down on him the very next second. Or in this case, the gantry barrier came crashing down.

Looking back, the man exhibited an expression of surprise.

You can watch the video here.

For reference purposes, the incident’s believed to have occurred at a car park located at Jurong West Street 81. The block number 838 is visible in the video.

HDB has since spoken out

If you thought that there would be some hefty measures taken against the man…

You’ll be surprised.

As it is, HDB has chosen not to take any action against him. Though we must say, it makes sense.

“The car park barrier at Jurong West St 81 malfunctioned on 16 October, and a motorist was unable to exit the car park,” their statement read. “As the barrier arm could not be lifted remotely, HDB’s service provider had advised the motorist (via the intercom) to push open the barrier so that he could exit the car park. The barrier arm is designed to be detachable as a failsafe measure to cater for such scenarios, hence no action will be taken against the motorist.”

Oh, so HDB told him to lift it up one lah.

Gantry Malfunction is as Common as My Colleague Farting

Now, I don’t drive but according to my very ugly colleague who does, it’s very common for these so-called “ERP car park gantry” to malfunction.

Usually, the gantry can’t scan the car’s IU, so he would move front and back just to get detected. Most of the times, when problems like this surface, the Intercom people would just remotely open the gantry.

Well, guess this time round, they can’t even control the gantry remotely, so too bad.

This isn’t the first time a gantry barrier kena knocked… down

In a previous video uploaded by Roads.sg, a taxi can be seen driving through the gantry even though the barrier was still down. The taxi driver was later reportedly charged a sum of S$970.49, including GST, for “new equipment replacement, installation, urgent activation, diagnosis reconstruct and system fine-tuning”.

And in another scenario, a woman knocked down a gantry barrier and was subsequently billed for S$1,391.

Not sure about you, but it’s rather shocking that the repairs for gantry are cheaper than a bench and a bus door #justsaying