Bridge rescue leads to traffic jam

Traffic crawled by as police tried to talk a woman out of jumping off the harbour bridge last night. Photo / Dean Purcell

Auckland motorway traffic banked up in two directions last night - back to Takapuna and to Spaghetti Junction - as police persuaded a woman to come off the harbour bridge.

Six of the bridge's eight lanes were closed for an hour and a half from about 5.30pm after the woman - estimated by a witness to be in her late 20s or early 30s - was seen sitting on a beam above the bridge's main stretch.

Inspector Ben Offner of the police northern communications centre said the woman was brought down from the bridge and was being assessed for psychiatric help.

A passenger in a car crawling south across the bridge about 5.15pm, before most of the lanes were closed, noticed the woman sitting near the edge of the beam, which supports a large traffic sign.

Marie Anderson said a police officer was standing near his car, which was parked on the far-left city-bound clip-on lane, evidently trying to talk the woman to leave the bridge.

Mr Offner would not discuss details of the incident or how the police managed to rescue the woman.

She is believed to have walked to the top of the bridge, rather than having used a car to get there, and Ms Anderson wondered why she had not been noticed on traffic surveillance cameras.

That was especially because the woman was wearing a bright-pink hoodie so would have been hard to miss.