I’m so tired of people saying “oh, we can’t fix this.” What you mean is that you’re not willing to fix it.
This could be solved by a simple transdimensional conduit that compressed the z-axis in the region directly on either side of the bridge, allowing arbitrarily tall vehicles to pass safely beneath before being reintegrated with normal space on the other side. Sure, it would cost untold trillions to even develop the framework for a technology that might make that possible some day hundreds of years from now.
MY point is that you’re not even willing to TRY, which frankly tells me everything I need to know about your priorities.
They raised the bridge, and that prevented this truck from having a serious accident.
It skimmed the warning bar, the guy running the website that profits from accidents is happy to call it a memeworthy accident, but I don’t know why other people are playing along.
Yeah - but you just KNOW some idiot’s gonna get half way through and reverse the polarity. It doesn’t matter whether it’s tall trucks or compressed z-axes, someone’s always gonna be the idiot who messes it up.
I had been under the (mistaken) impression that Peabody Street was wide enough to have dedicated turn lanes; having just spent a while in Street View, I see that it isn’t. At the very least, though, the warning bar could have been moved from just in front of the bridge (where it provides a front line of defense for the concrete of the bridge, but no warning at all for drivers) to the edge of the Gregson/Peabody intersection. Or add my proposed hanging-weights warning bar at the intersection and leave the shaver bar where it is. The 10-12 extra feet might not be enough for drivers boogying straight down Gregson, but it might wake up the ones making a turn off Peabody.
Drive-through restaurants and parking structures deal with this problem ALL THE TIME, and they don’t typically have multi-million-dollar budgets for the task. I just feel like the city of Durham gave up prematurely on the idea of driver warnings; it’s been obvious for years now that the signs weren’t sufficient, but it should have been equally obvious that there are a lot of trucks out there in the 13’ range, and their drivers might not be any more attentive to road signs than their shorter compatriots.
There would be no warning bar if there was no bridge. The bar may do the damage but the bridge claims the honour of kill number 151 for its coup tally. The elders have allowed this.
If you want something to blame, try the well-oiled nut behind the steering wheel.
The truck cleared the actual bridge! No “cans” were “opened”.
All the re-heated arguments about the unique and inviolate physical parameters of the bridge and neighbourhood have nothing to do with the fact that the warning bar is maybe a half an inch lower than the bridge, at the exact center part of the road.
The “can-opener” website received views because it offered fun spectacular full-impact crashes, not because it scratched a roof. It’s actually kind of sad this got posted, and hyped as some kind of victim-making accident.
Pedantry aside, it doesn’t really matter; the ‘accident’ and all damage that was incurred could have been avoided completely by just taking a different route.
I’ve noted this in other comment fora – the UK actually measures the height assuming the longest normal legal axle distance and measures from the chord to the lowest part of the bridge above.
N.Y. State assumes a curb to the side of the road surface 6" (~15cm) above said surface, and measures from the top of the curb – so for level approaches NY drivers are used to a measurement more generous than actual.
Other US states just measure from the actual road surface to the lowest part that’s directly above a traffic lane, and don’t bother to adjust even if that is in a very obvious dip in the road.
It’s always tempting to say “my country does it right, your country wrong!”, but from my perspective the UK method is the only obviously correct one.
There was no design flaw. The bridge was designed to regulations in 1940, as 11 foot 8 inches. Those regs changed in 1973: two feet higher. But Durham chose not to rebuild it. So, perhaps a flaw or mistake politically, but not an original design flaw.
Oh I think its on the way, across the board. With self driving cars slowly approaching feasibility, “driving” a rental truck in the future may just mean saying “meet me at such and such an address”.
