Sad news: truck-eating bridge to be raised this week

6 posts were split to a new topic: Human factors

I had hoped, some day, to be able to respond to one of these videos with the classic:

We_took_that_top_row_of_chickens_off_slicker_than_scum_off_a_Louisiana_swamp

Now that day will never come. Sigh.

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That FAQ can be dumped in the nearest lake.

If you read the FAQ, you come away with the idea that there was never any achievable way to solve the problem (too complicated, too costly, too much of an inconvenience to rando delivery drivers, etc.). It’s a master essay of defeatist pessimism, when what was needed was 500k, and a different amount of clearance. It wasn’t a Hellmouth.

The guy running the website is the first person who would be happy to just hype the “unsolve-ability” of the issue. He’s nice, but he’s not invested in solving anything.

I’m sure most of the accidents were due to inattentiveness, but some would have been situational blindness, and there was always a risk of collateral damage to “innocent” drivers or pedestrians.

“Common sense” doesn’t always indicate the best place to have a stop sign, let alone a sign system that decided against using the words, “Low” “Bridge” or “Stop”.

I’m glad it’s finally being addressed in better physical terms. There will be less human pain, net.

There's also an argument that the more complicated that intersection got with *common sense* additions, the more likely people would mess it up.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/154193120805201819
https://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/14930/

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Taller trucks! Taller trucks! We want taller trucks!

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It’s all cool. They modeled the changes in GTA5.

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Cheaper and easier to just regrade (lower) the road.

I think the last time this topic came up (or maybe the time before that, or the time before that) I expressed that if I was a rental truck driver I probably would not assume that the message “Overheight Must Turn” applied to me. I probably would be puzzled for a bit, then proceed straight when the light inevitably turned green.

If the sign said “YOU are overheight and must turn” I’d obey that one just fine.

Speaking for myself.

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PS: @beschizza, you got wazrothed.

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Sad news indeed, luckily we still have the Bayswater (Western Australia) underpass in all it’s glory.

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The 11 ft 8 inch bridge is 3.6 m.(after being raised to 12 ft 4, it will be a staggering 3.7 m)

Right! These videos brought tears I laughed so hard. Then I think well any investment in safety is good? Then I got sad tears and realized how deep it all is.

Dear BBS: Does this end of an era call for a “Proper Obituary?” I suspect so. Let us collectively mourn the loss but embrace the notion it’s going to Heaven where it is safe from all those nasty vehicles. This intersection will remain a treasured memory for SO many.

Anyone know the local paper? We could send something nice to publish?

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The blue icon points to the bridge.

Durham platform is a railway platform, and constrains how high the railroad bridge can be raised.

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Until a taller truck or load comes along. So all the systems will still, presumably, be in place.

But I take your points.

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You hold onto your dreams, Bill. That phrase is bound to come in handy one day.

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Nope. There’s a sewer main beneath the road. You’d have to regrade much of the sewer system.

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(For pedantic accuracy’s sake, 8 inches is a little over .2 m, not .1 m)

And that’s probably the kind of attitude that should get a person disqualified from any building or engineering project.

Think about it, if someone took eight inches off you, you’d probably think it was an emergency. You might even be staggered…

One notes that a metric/imperial mixup resulted in a Mars probe being lost.

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A bigger constraint is that the Duke Street crossing is a level crossing. (Also, no one calls it Durham Platform, OpenStreetMaps.)

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