Truck-eating bridge devours speeding victim

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/05/truck-eating-bridge-devours-sp.html

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What an interesting use of the word “victim.”

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He was almost through! If he had just kept his foot on the pedal a bit harder, he would have made it.

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I live 10 min from this bridge and these never get old. Maybe out of town people don’t know about it, but nobody here has a good excuse. Plus all the signage flashing at you now.

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Where was the Swimming Pool emergency?

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The traffic light is yellow and about to turn red, so naturally the driver accelerates – hoping to blue-shift that red light back into the green wavelengths.

Sadly, the driver was not able to reach light speed in time to avert the red right.

Now the driver may face traffic-light charges, in addition to whatever charges apply after smashing your truck into a notorious truck-eating bridge.

(Update: blue-shift, not red-shift.)

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It looked like he was trying to get through the light as it was changing. I am not a truck driver, but that in itself seems like not a good thing to do in a tractor-trailer.

I’m amazed that the bridge itself has survived so many hits.

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I started a thread on this because I was impatient waiting for @Boingboing to post it.

By my math:

I have to say that 34 miles per hour is a bit… is disappointing the right word? Probably not.

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He just made a simple mistake in his understanding of special relativity. It’s length contraction, not height contraction.

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At this point, since they can neither lower the road nor raise the bridge why not modify the bridge to more cleanly shear off the tops of the trucks that are taller than the clearance? Put something like a splitting wedge along the edge of the bridge rather than a rectangular beam. That would reduce the time required to clear the scene, as the bottom 11 feet 8 inches of the truck would go all the way through and you’d just have to haul away the sheared-off top rather than needing to pull out the stuck truck.

I’m being mostly facetious, but if it’s going to open up trucks like a can opener why not make it the best can opener it can be? Don’t half-ass it.

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That was pretty awesome because it catches him also running the red light if their local laws are the same as mine.

I wonder of the footage ever goes back to the companies employing the drivers and gets their licenses revoked.

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I am curious… why can’t they lower the road? It would roughly be the cost of dirt removal and repaving.

I think this particular driver is at fault here, and was speeding, and ignored signage, but if you have a dedicated website for how these accidents are completely predictable before-the-fact, then it’s not entirely the fault of bad drivers.

Maybe they’re waiting for someone to get killed?

Eventually they’ll get a (justified) class action suit against the city, and the existence of this website will be great evidence for the drivers, not the city.

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Swimming Pool doot com’s social media campaign is getting intense!

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A major sewer runs just 4 feet under the street.

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City planning’s no joke, I guess.

Fresh blood for the the Recall Coordinator’s formula.

Maybe more dramatic “signage” would help?



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Check the FAQ on 11foot8.com
http://11foot8.com/faq/

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The “OVERHEIGHT MUST TURN” sign is new, I think.

I seem to remember someone suggesting something much like that last time. Effective isn’t it?

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Wouldn’t the cheapest solution be to turn the intersection into a four-way stop? That way the drivers might get a chance to see the warning sign and definitely won’t be moving very fast.

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Half a block before the trestle, a sensor detects overheight vehicles and triggers an LED blackout warning sign that was installed in May 2016. That same sensor also triggers a red-light phase at the traffic light directly in front of the trestle

(from the above linked FAQ)

So the red light he was trying to run, had in fact been triggered by himself :roll_eyes:

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