I had this misfortune, 2 bikes on roof rack, drove into multistorey car park forgetting they were there. Heard a loud bang - which was mostly my rear windscreen shattering. The combination of the roof bars and the bike mounts was sturdy enough (and well fixed to the bikes) that the whole contraption slid backwards until stopped by the door posts, then the front mounts sprang open allowing the entire assembly to rotate backwards (shattering the window) then the back ones also sprang.
I got out swearing, to find rack and bikes sitting on the entrance road behind the car - bikes barely scratched, rack and mounts only slightly warped. In my defence, it was a hospital car park, and I was rushing there after hearing my son had been admitted - thankfully all was fine in the end, and after patching the rear window with a groundsheet and remounting the bikes with the help of the friendly car park security guards we headed home. Took weeks to get all the bloody glass bits out of the boot…
There’s an intersection with traffic light right before the road travels under the train bridge. Lots of overheight traffic goes through that intersection. The water curtain would always be pouring torrents of water.
I can walk to this bridge from my house. Every time I’m over there, I try to figure out where the cameras are. So far I haven’t been able to locate them.
I think the only viable solution would be to bring the road grade up to the grade of the railroad tracks, but then we’ll have drunk people and vehicles getting destroyed by trains, as happens at other crossings in town.
Yup. You can only do so much to protect people from their own stupidity, before the responsibility falls on them. In this case, every driver who smashes into that bridge is personally responsible for getting their vehicle smashed.
In this case, I think a lot, perhaps most, of the trucks that smack into that bridge are rentals, driven by people who aren’t pro truck drivers.
Well you CAN have much steeper grades than usual for situations like this, where only a small portion of a long train will be on it at one time. It’s possible that the bridge could be redesigned with more, shallower girders. Either way, that’s asking the RR to spend 10s possibly 100s of millions of dollars to save rental truck drivers 10s of thousands of dollars. Even if it was the RRs own trucks, the payback on this is almost certainly more than 100 years.
I don’t think you could raise the road here without also making extensive changes to Peabody and the Brightleaf block of Gregson. Morgan Imports and Lilly’s would end up being garden-level.
I actually prevented one such incident at that bridge when helping a friend move last year. He had been living a few blocks away for a few years, yet was totally unaware of that bridge’s notoriety. I had to essentially scream at him to turn left at the last moment, and then explain why. Pretty sure we would have nailed it, which would have really sucked after helping him to get all their crap into the truck in the first place.
