All it takes is one person who hasn’t seen this before to ask the question, and everyone gets exasperated because the internet isn’t a hivemind.
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The overheight sensor is wired to change the light to red when it detects an oversized truck approaching, but the light has to turn green after that while the “HEY IDIOT TURN YOUR TRUCK” sign flashes at them because otherwise there’s no way for the truck to proceed through the intersection in any direction.
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Maybe based on SHARKS WITH LASERS ON THEIR HEADS!
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Why the fucking hell would anyone want to click onto som Facebook link? Surely you can find another source?
What’s the point of comparing the total those 139 people spent wrecking their vehicles with the amount it would cost the railroad to idiot-proof their bridge?
A crash can’t cost the railroad much. (Maybe they have to paint every four years instead of ten?) And it isn’t like Howard’s Building Supply is going to kick in for a new bridge.
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They need one of those impossible totally real science fiction lasers that can slice the roof off the truck off before it hits the bridge.
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Something people haven’t mentioned (maybe they’re watching the clip without sound) is that the SUV driver also honks at the truck as it’s backing up, repeatedly. Backing up immediately would have avoided the collision, but if I were in their position I wouldn’t expect the truck to:
A: Back up immediately without getting out to assess the situation
B: Not check behind them before backing up
C: Ignore being honked at several times
If anything, I would instinctively assume that there were probably cars behind me and that backing up wasn’t the best option in the situation. I would have been wrong, but it’s not like there was a lot of time to make that determination. I doubt most people have that lightning-quick thinking after watching a sudden, dramatic accident.
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The way he hesitated I almost wonder if he usually has a heavy load and does make it if he just slows a bit to avoid rocking or bumping up on the way through.
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And remember that out of 100M people, you don’t hear from the 99,999,999 that already know the answer, just that 1 who doesn’t.
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we’ve got one like this where I live, there are prominent signs on each end of the street saying what the clearance is, every now and then a truck goes down and gets stuck. it’s also on an incline so during heavy rains it gets flooded directly under the bridge and I walk my kid to school and see cars sitting half drowned under the bridge. I guess people drive in expecting it not to be deep, although how I don’t understand because it looks really deep. maybe I just know so I misjudge these people as idiots when they’re just trying to get buy in a badly engineered world.
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From where I sit, the idea that tripping the overheight sensor should lock the light on red until it can be manually reset seems perfectly reasonable.
Even with a red light prohibiting traffic going under, traffic approaching the bridge can always turn right (and there’s an at-grade crossing half a kilometer west).
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What if, ear me out, what if they LOWER the bridge ? They add a big bright orange beam 20, 30 cm lower than the bridge deck, making it obvious to truck driver they can’t use it ?
Or crushing them to death. I don’t know civil engineering.
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This one never gets old.
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why no traffic calming and no major white line chevrons etcetera… even yet…
can this only be done after the major road widening
There are plenty in Melbourne. I was walking with friends when we saw a truck hit the bridge in Clarendon St near Flinders.
Then some years back a truck driver got caught (IIRC) in Flemington. He saw the bridge in time, tried a U turn, and brought the whole tram overhead down.
edit: Oh yeah, Merri Pde, Northcote. I cycled past there one night and there was sheet metal everywhere. The truck chassis was fine, but the box on top was in shreds.
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Forget hitting the car. That truck was inches from sliding across the hood and slicing the drivers head.
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The canopener bridge benefits from having a rental truck company nearby that provides fresh fodder regularly, and a convenient mount point for cameras cared for by an interested and motivated party. The Vollmer road viaduct gets a lot of golf course traffic I guess.
I took a look on Google Earth. I had always thought that substation was a poorly-sited church
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Simulations into attempts to rectify this problem inevitably end up with Skynet/the Matrix.
Interestingly, the outcome is more 78% more likely to be Skynet and human extinction than the Matrix. Turns out even AI overlords get fed up with stupid meatbags asking questions and decide we’re not worth keeping around even as a fuel source.
Or maybe that’s just the inherent bias of the simulation programmers at work?
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Why does James Bond always have the answer?
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