Such low bridges can even be intentional. I read something about some city planning where there were intentionally too low bridges between the rich and the poor part of the city so the bus traffic carrying mostly the undesirable hoi polloi would get “naturally” excluded.
I suspect the world needs far more bridges like this.
Non-lethal filters on driving skill and attentiveness are a good thing, in my opinion. Especially when you’re talking about vehicles of that size.
The driving attentiveness filter on the road where I live is called Odocoileus virginianus. There’s a lot more blood and death involved in just one rut than this bridge sees in a decade.
I recall (perhaps incorrectly) the time that a truck containing scissors overturned after having its top peeled off, and some absurd number of vehicles ended up with four flat tires.
The buried assumption here, is that the “idiot driver” deserves what s/he gets, and the cost of this “justice” is negligible.
An alternate view holds that there is a source of toxic Internet meme, spewing forth product reliably once a month, and the cost of shutting down this fountain of insult would be worth it.
I’m not a big fan of laughing at people either, although I do sometimes because I’m human. I think indulging in Schadenfreude is kind of bad karma. Nonetheless, if you can’t show that eliminating that “fountain of insult” will save the city and/or railroad companies money, they will never pay to fix this. Nor should they.
This train trestle is about 100 years old. At the time when it was built, there were no standards for minimum clearance…
Yet, I was able to locate a report from 1908 concerning the Gregson Street Trestle, in which the North Carolina Commission ordered the North Carolina Railroad Company and the Southern Railway Company to repair the Trestle. The Order specifies a clearance of not less than twelve feet.
Who’s burying that assumption? It’s right out there in plain sight. Suppose this weren’t an overpass, but a normal street-level train crossing. And suppose the signs and flashing lights warned potential crossers of oncoming trains. Drivers of sound mind and body who ignored the signs and lights and blithely drove right into oncoming trains might not expect a hell of a lot of sympathy. But what should we do, outlaw the trains?
I’ve checked in at 11foot8.com for years now, and a huge percentage of the crashes I’ve seen have involved rental trucks and oversize RVs, mostly driven by amateur chuckleheads like me who don’t make a living driving large trucks around. They weren’t paying attention, or ignored the warnings, or misunderestimated (thanks, George!) the height of their vehicles, and lived to regret it with little more than a headache and possibly walletache to show for it. The professional drivers who hit that beam are really the ones who oughta feel like idiots, but even the regular schmoes moving across town in a big U-Haul have the same obligation we all do to watch out for warning signs and signals, and to not try to squeeze their vehicle through a space in which it won’t fit.
The same court order required the city to grade and macadamize the street so presumably it was dirt at the time. The order didn’t specify if the 12’ clearance was before or after the macadamization. Even if it was 12’ taking the macadamization into account the subsequent asphalt or concrete paving could’ve taken up 4".
No, I cringed. Just as I cringe when someone shows me a video of cars crashing on the ice. Car crashes are ugly to watch, no matter how richly deserving the foolish drivers.
Car crashes are fascinating to watch. All kinds of crashes and failures are.
…that said, car crashes are fairly boring when compared with process plant mishaps. More energy released there, and thanks to the ubiquitous surveillance cameras in the plants these days there are many videos even on youtube with both the early and the late stages of the incidents.
