Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/28/sad-news-truck-eating-bridge.html
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Well, the joke’s on them.
I was told numerous times that raising that bridge was impossible due to cost and physics.
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They’ll just drive a crane into it and job done.
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Don’t be sad, they’re just moving it to a truck stop upstate where it can eat trucks all day long. It will be happy there.
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Making America Grade Again?
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Anyone taking bets on when the first 12’6" truck hits it?
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It’s sad…because ya know, paying attention to road signs while driving is just too hard?
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So sad. Can’t even trust physics anymore.
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It was always the former that made it “impossible”. I guess the city finally got the railroad to pony up for the work and got the local businesses to take a hit on traffic convenience.
I’ll miss the fun of idiots in rental trucks thinking “I can make it, I can make it…” (generously assuming they were thinking at all).
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Train jumping – Casey Jones is the new Evil Knievel.
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There’s always the University of Louisville can opener. https://www.reddit.com/r/thecanopener/
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The important thing isn’t that lives or property will be saved, but that I was right all along in a dozen internet shit-fights about whether such a thing could be done. I feel like I should have some sort of mocking, celebratory dance prepared.
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So I wonder what the cost of this is…Certainly enough that they tried just about everything else first.
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Except for the warning signs, they tried nothing else first. As I understand it, the solution always involved raising the bridge, since the roadway couldn’t be lowered sufficiently due to underground infrastructure being fairly close to the surface. It was probably less a matter of “how much?” than “who pays?”, and the railroad didn’t want to take on any cost (including re-routing trains) for what it likely said was the city’s problem. Meanwhile, the city didn’t want to inconvenience local businesses while traffic was re-routed.
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Well they went from simple bridge height signs to warning lights to a special sign activated by overheight sensors with specific instructions. All that iteration was probably approaching $1m before they gave up and decided to raise the bridge.
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The end of an era
The end of a timespan.
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The primary victims seemed to be rental trucks, who’s drivers probably didn’t know how high their truck was, and aren’t accustomed to watching for those height signs that are background noise to regular cars. This bridge was also unusually low, so it was probably easy to get complacent on the smaller trucks that fit under “all” standard bridges.
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I’m just laughing at the posters that said it would take over a billion dollars in a “Big Dig” style operation.
This just shows that someone (I’m not blaming anyone specifically) really was just being stubborn, not that it wasn’t a cost-possible project.
So much energy rationalising a status quo. I’m glad it’s getting fixed before a bystander pedestrian gets maimed as collateral damage.
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The real “victim” here is that YouTuber, who built a handsome business around the fact that he happened to live in an apartment with a good camera view of the bridge. He’ll continue to make passive income off the existing videos for a while until the algorithm ratios him out, but he’s gonna need a new gig.
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