Eat one truck, shame on the truck driver. Eat more than one truck a month over a ten-year period, shame on the city.
Yes, every single one of the drivers involved is stupid and made stupid choices and should be fined and possibly flogged. Yes, some of this can be attributed to the evils of late stage capitalism (or whatever). But somewhere around the 100th truck, the city has to do more or it becomes depraved indifference. At that point you know your signs and flashing lights aren’t working.
(N.B.: the depraved indifference we display by chuckling over these videos is fine. It ain’t our bridge.)
The road somehow absolutely can’t be lowered? The bridge for whatever reason absolutely can’t be raised? There are always other ways. Heavy signs hung from chains at bridge height that will whap the truck, maybe. Or maybe that particular underpass isn’t absolutely necessary to exist in the first place.
Municipal governance is hard. Still gotta do it. “But other people are stupid!” isn’t an excuse not to.
I get that it’s old. I get that people are idiots.
But if you have a road where idiots are predictably hurting themselves, “tradition” isn’t the best argument. Every city in the world has roads that were retired from service or re-routed because they were built more for horses and would be dangerous for cars. That’s what should have happened here, instead there’s a website that’s ready to film a predictable and preventable human loss.
Eventually one of these trucks will skid, flip or crush another car following in traffic, either as a side crash or rear-ender. It’s not hard to imagine the driver of another car getting it in the neck, despite not being an idiot.
Transport Official: You are going to need to lower that load.
Truck Driver: The load is fine. I have taken it all the way across Saskatchewan and Alberta. There were no issues.
TO: This is not the flatland. You are going to need to lower the load. You will not get through the tunnels.
TD: Nope, not gonna do that.
Scene: At the first tunnel with debris scattered everywhere.
The tunnels will handle your standard container truck, as will our overpasses. Anything higher and you are severely testing your luck. Truck drivers don’t seem to realise that the mountains do not move.
No. You would literally have to rebuild a significant chunk of Durham to do this, based on how the roads, railroads, and facilities are graded in this area. (That said, I guess they did this in Seattle in the 1800s, but that time the whole city was flooding twice a day.)
The city has been doing quite a bit. They spent a pretty penny on the laser system. That said, I wonder if the red light does more harm than good due to the runners. (Check out the older videos for the old signal system.)
I don’t think this’ll work any better than the current system. If it did, it’d just push the damage further up the road – if the knocker is enough to sufficiently alert a 10-ton vehicle going 40 miles per hour to the point where they decide to brake, it’s enough to damage it significantly. (Is my hunch.)
This is the main southbound thoroughfare through the western half of central Durham. It’s a state road. There’s no other road with similar capacity in the area that the state route could be rerouted to. You can’t just dump all that traffic onto Mangum. (This would reroute all sorts of traffic straight through the middle of downtown, too, which, nah.)
The “correct” fix to this problem would involve Big Dig levels of infrastructure improvement (in complexity if not in size), not to mention the coordination of NCRR, the state DOT, and the city. Give it a few billion dollars and it might be possible.
Okay! A few billion dollars in infrastructure improvements for Durham it is! Especially since there’d probably be some knock-on benefits from eliminating a monthly shutdown of this all-important thoroughfare. And by all means, spread that pain around to the state, county, feds, railroads, Rosicrucians, anyone with a stake.
I mean, I’m taking your estimate at face value, and I guess you could be wrong, but it’s not like those billions of dollars would just go up in smoke. Local infrastructure improvements are good for the local economy.
I get that it’s an absurdly difficult problem. I’m sure all my amateur ideas are probably stupid and unworkable. But "our new signs still aren’t working so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ " doesn’t seem sustainable in this case. Or rather, it is sustainable (tune in next month…) but it’s no way to run a railroad, or a regular road.
EDIT: I should clarify, IF the billion-dollar-fix scenario is correct, then I’m not saying that a billion dollars should be spent reducing the number of trucks getting eaten (Keynesian paradise though that would be). I’m saying that if the local infrastructure manifests this kind of problem because there’s no conceivable way to do without this underpass and no conceivable way to improve it, and a billion dollars worth of infrastructure (roads, sewerage, electric, buildings, railroads, etc.) would need to be disrupted, then there’s already a pressing need for major renewal in this general area.
The analogy to the Big Dig is a great one (I’m afraid). It’s not that you couldn’t travel through Boston, it’s that you couldn’t make travel through Boston one iota less awful without changing everything. Which was the right move for a thousand reasons in addition to the fact that now you don’t have a million U-Hauls hitting the bridge on Storrow Drive.
The crazy thing is that I just rented a Penske 16’ box truck and was given zero instructions on driving it or its height. I ended up accidentally on a NY parkway with a 10’4” bridge height. Google maps doesn’t seem to know bridge heights.
And I’ve watched tons of these videos so I should know but it easily could have happened to me.
There are a LOT of 12’ clearance bridges out there. This one is 11’8", which causes a lot of problems for slightly overheight vehicles. In this case, the vehicle was WAY overheight. Like, almost a foot overheight? Increasing the clearance to 12’, which would cost both a huge amount of money and block a major intersection and a major train route, would not have prevented this accident. The semi would still have slammed into the bridge preclearance bar.
As someone else mentioned, increase the clearance and someone’s always going to bring a bigger truck.
I wonder if they’ve considered cheap and clever early warning systems only to have received pushback that it will be detrimental to the local economy. If that’s at all true, there should perhaps be a glorious overhead welcome sign just for trucks taller than 11’8".
The preclearance bar that does the actual can opening is reflective bright yellow and black (except it has to be repainted every few months).
There have been no recorded major injuries or fatalities at the 11’8" bridge.
They have changed it, several times. They keep escalating the warnings and prevention mechanisms, and people keep making the mistake. I would need to look up the numbers, but I do believe the frequency of accidents has decreased. The point is, there is a reasonable limit to the level of escalation, and it still won’t completely prevent the problem.
ETA: If you go through the archive of 11’8" bridge hits, you’ll see that over 90% of them involve the vehicle running a red light prior to the hit. That says a lot about who is really the problem here. (hint: it’s not the bridge)
Yes, I’m sure that no one in the city of Durham or the state planning department has thought of any of this before you. You should go demand payment for your incredible insight on solving this issue that, somehow, has gone without due consideration for life, property, or traffic congestion for so long! For surely, this is a simple problem that can be easily and decisevely fixed by the collective commenting on the internet, instead of all these silly overemployed and overpaid civil engineers with all the data.
