“Boss, I have a great idea for viral marketing of swimmingpool . com. Just wait you will love it…”
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There’s sewer works just below the road surface. To lower the road would require millions of dollars of infrastructural changes throughout the downtown area.
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The red light is actually triggered by the truck in response to the overheight vehicle. The intention is that the tall vehicle will stop at the light, the driver will contemplate the signage and their life choices, and make an appropriate choice. But the triggering distance of the light is just close enough that some cavalier truck drivers just floor it.
Lately it’s been a battle between “who wants to race the light” and “who stops and then makes poor life choices” when it comes to most common bridge collisions.
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So… Time to tighten up the yellow light and make the would be Andretti’s really fight for it?
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DOT has standards for minimum yellow light timing, so not sure how feasible that is. And as this driver demonstrates, the yellowness of the light doesn’t seem to have a lot of bearing on the choice to run or not.
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The tragedy here is that there’s no hi-def camera mounted under the bridge specifically to catch the look on the drivers faces as the impact occurs.
I’d pay $ for that.
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The FAQ CSMcDonald pointed out (thanks!) explains there is a sensor a block back that triggers a red light cycle when an overheight vehicle approaches. So the light turns red and the driver is supposed to have the entire light cycle to contemplate the big flashing LED sign. But, as you can see from the videos on the site, so many of the trucks are speeding or running the light.
Edit: whoops. Wazroth already explained.
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Gregson is a high-volume, two-lane state road, and one of the main southbound thoroughfares through this part of town. Pettigrew is a piddly little road that’s mostly retail access. I’m not a traffic engineer but it strikes me that this is exactly the wrong place to put a stop sign, especially since all the other traffic control in the area is lights. Maybe not though?
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Also known as that special traffic light color, “deep yellow.”
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The FAQ’s informative. It doesn’t change the situation.
The city maintains a dangerous road, where there is a predictable incidence of injury.
There are remedies, but people think they’re “too expensive” or that they would inconvenience “a restaurant and some local delivery guys”.
Signage that doesn’t do anything is the equivalent of an EULA. It might indemnify the city legally, but the drivers didn’t build this intersection. Morally they should fix it, the same way people shouldn’t be able to put moats of acid around their house and then solely blame people for not reading the sign before they fell in.
City design that depends on perfect compliance is not good city design.
What’s going to probably happen is that someone with actual money will get into a bad enough accident that they sue and win for municipal negligence, and then the “impossibly expensive” options will look cheaper than getting sued again. After someone’s been meat-grinded for the cause.
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Y’know, I can never fathom how so many people who drive professionally and end up going that route through Durham never seem to have heard of “the Can Opener,” nor to heed the many warnings and cautionary tales about it.
You’d think such a thing would be legendary among truck drivers by now, especially in the age of the internet.
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The trestle and roadway are over 100 years old before modern code and design.
They have done everything possible to warn the idiots.
The only thing I think further one can do is just block of the whole roadway for EVERYONE which is also a bad design.
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The new sign and traffic lights were were activated on May 12, 2016, and less than two months later on July 6, a moving truck defeated the warning system and fed the bridge, proving once again that stupidity can’t be fixed.
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I was surprised to see a semi: most of the trucks are clearly rentals with non-commercial drivers. And I have some sympathy, whenever I’ve driven one of those I’ve had my attention divided in such a way that I occasionally miss signage, particularly novel signage.
But I also stick close to the speed limit when I’m doing that, so this system would probably save me.
I do like the idea of a stop sign in front of it, with an explicit “all trucks detour here” integrated into it.
They’ll just bring a taller truck.
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I’m not even sure a knocker bar is permissible on a state highway. You’d need to have it as far out as the laser trigger anyway, and as we’ve seen, trucks’ll still speed right through. Then you get a truck damaged first by the knocker bar, then by the crash beam.
And then trucks turning from Pettigrew would crash too. (Which has happened!)
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Iowa City, Iowa has a similar bridge, with one of those clearance warning measures. When I was there it was chains dangling down that hit the top of the truck. I worked in the English-Philosophy Building, in a room with windows looking right out at the truck-eating bridge. College town, so tons of rental trucks. People speed. The chains seldom helped. Generally people just blew thru them. At other times, they locked up the brakes and skidded into the bridge. Only now and then did someone stop, and then they had to reverse over a 100 yards back across a bridge. Whatever happened, it never failed to be a show.
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Why they don’t put a bar before, with steel plates that make noise, like in the underpass above? There’s a roundabout before rather the traffic stop. But havint the horizontal bar before will make more visible the problem.
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People with “actual money” don’t drive trucks, if they even drive at all!
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