The bridge has a large metal I-beam installed in front of it. People hit the I-beam, not the bridge.
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And moving any farther forward probably won’t make much of a difference.
It is easier to see from the side view as you can see the supporting beams on the sidewalk.
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I think it is pretty clear at this point that this intersection was built on sacred grounds or a long forgotten alter for human sacrifice. The bridge is now the host of the angry ones. The bridge, it hungers for chaos. The bridge must feed.
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Yes, I know that. But the beam is immediately in front of the bridge as far as I can see, and to a driver it looks like part of the bridge, I suspect. I am talking about something wholly detached from and some distance in front of the bridge - i.e. right at the corner of the crossroads, making it impossible to get anywhere near the bridge without hitting a stand-alone cross beam, which being stand-alone I’d be pretty confident would be more likely to get a driver’s attention.
Personally, I find it harder to judge (i.e. easier to misjudge) the height of a stand-alone height restrictor (e.g. at entrances to car parks) than to judge the height of a bridge I can see the underside and other end of.
The buildings all along Pettigrew and Gregson leading up to the bridge are historically protected mill buildings and warehouses, not to mention key retail locations. Raising the road surface 15 feet would be problematic.
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The crash beam has one purpose: to protect the bridge. Moving it further from the bridge would not reduce the risk of people crashing (it’d be at best like 20 feet from the bridge) but I suspect would risk damaging the bridge more (since often the part of the vehicle that gets under the beam pops up, especially for articulated vehicles). Also, the railroad owns the crash beam, and the corner is city property, not railroad property.
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I have to assume that the people who have to deal with the accidents that the bridge causes are intelligent enough to have considered all of the options and all of the consequences and have concluded that the best solution is the one that they’ve settled on.
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It’s not inattentive idiots, it’s just normal people. The reason you stop at stop signs isn’t that you are a genius and read every sign within your view and similarly the reason you may have missed a few in your life isn’t that you are an idiot who can’t read four letters. You recognize the sign because you have been shown thousands and thousands of stop signs throughout your life and you don’t have to read it to know what to do even when distracted. When faced with a unique sign, you have to give it specific attention to realize what it is trying to tell you. When you drive around you generally believe road conditions are going to be designed for the safe operation of your vehicle and you take in just enough of the text plastered all over every roadway to get you where you are going and whatever percentage you don’t read generally have no impact on your safety… Most signs that tell you of clear obstacle ahead probably also block a closed or partially closed road. So short of dropping a pike across the road and having everyone stop and be told by a person they can’t drive a 12 ft truck down the road, about one person a month is going to be distracted or nervous or not fluent in english, and just not read the signs and crash, damaging a truck, and potentially hurting themselves and others, even if only genius level folks drive by.
This is the thing. Human error is universal and should, to the best of our abilities, be accounted for in design.
Oh, and: “Other people are not inferior versions of you.”
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Well, leave the crash protection at the bridge and add a second further forward. But the land and responsibility ownership is a separate problem and may be why this is the only solution around.
Exactly. And a (possibly unique) very low stand-alone gantry well ahead of the bridge might be sufficiently different to grab the extra attention that is very much needed here.
And my hypothetical suggestion was merely that - an ‘in principle’ solution design that may better handle such errors. The land ownership issue raised above may be a real inhibitor in practice.
Anyway, it was - as I said - just a hypothetical. I’ll wait for the next entertaining episode to be posted but will probably have nothing more to say about it.
I stand by my point that the two moneyed interests co-own a truck crusher that crushes peoples trucks without consent and they should either change it so it doesn’t crush non consenting trucks or its owners should pay to uncrush said trucks.
Both the city and the railroad consider they have accounted for that, to the reasonable extent.
And no, the people driving their trucks into that bridge are not inferior versions of you or me, but they are still unobservant dumbasses, and I reserve the right to laugh at them, especially since no people are being hurt.
If I ever fuck up as egregiously, you have my permission to laugh at me, too.
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If the design had sufficiently addressed human error, a truck wouldn’t crash monthly.
I mean, America’s Funniest home videos show us we can laugh at people recieving injuries from which they will recover, so chuckle away. I think if I crashed into this bridge, I would laugh at myself, that said, like you said, we are all dumbasses and setting a trap that catches dumbasses in the middle of a public street should have some ramifications.
So it was a Penske, then.
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At this point, I think you could brick up the entire opening under the bridge and people would still be driving trucks through it.
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You miss the point. Inattention is not the problem. No amount of extra signage or warnings are going to help because the existing signs, flashing warning lights and (formerly) hi-vis height bars would already have sorted it out. The issue here is that driving a rental truck is just like driving a regular car after the first five minutes and lots of folks automatically fall into that same car-driving head space where they ignore all the max height notices because no height restriction was ever so low that it affected them, they only apply to people driving tru-KERSMAAAAAAASH!
My understanding is that high vehicles need to be able to get very close to the bridge in question to go to places where such vehicles can safely travel for deliveries, etc.
They’re just not supposed to turn under the bridge.
There are significant limits to where barriers could be put without cutting off significant areas.
Could they install a low-clearance bar?
A low clearance bar is a bar suspended by chains ahead of the bridge. Overheight vehicles hit that bar first and the noise alerts the driver to to the problem. I understand that this approach has been successful in other places, but it’s not practical here. There are many overheight trucks that have to be able to drive right up to the bridge and turn onto Peabody St. in order to deliver supplies to several restaurants. Making Peabody St inaccessible from Gregson St would make the restaurant owners and the delivery drivers very unhappy.
No. People crush their (or usually the rental companies’) trucks themselves. The bridge is just there. It doesn’t do anything.
Trucks getting damaged by driver error is a financial issue and, yes, sucks for the driver if their insurance doesn’t cover it - which I understand most don’t.
Trains derailing and falling on buildings and people would be seriously bad though so they’ve protected the bridge from being crashed into. They put up warning signs (some pretty ingenious ones too).
This is how things are solved. The problem has been reduced to a manageable level.
More effort would not produce sufficient benefit to be worth it.
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Indeed that is part of the problem - possibly a major part. You also miss my point about if people are going to drive into something anyway, it will possibly incur less damage to vehicles and reduce risk of damage to bridge, as well as perhaps reduce time delays as a result of not having trucks actually stuck under the bridge itself, if there were a stand-alone gantry well in advance of the bridge itself. If it were one of the ‘hanging chains’ variety, that might all be even more true.
