There is an infinite amount of work that we could do to prevent accidents on every mile of roadway in the United States. There are thousands of locations that see numerous fatalities every year, not just amusing truck peeling. Shouldn’t we start with those?
There are diminishing returns on this kind of work, but particularly where it involves people who ignore signage, speed and run lights.
I was looking for a picture of a tunnel entry sign, since they have a similar problem, and I literally just ran into this same product’s site. I wonder how expensive it is, and what type of water source it needs. It looks super cool though.
If a trucker actually pays attention to the warnings, they turn somewhere before the bridge, right? There is an Alternate Truck Route through that area of the city? If so, there needs to be a way to make that Alternate Truck Route mandatory for trucks.
Well, as we’re often quick to point out, the road is right on top of a major sewer line. So… bonus points for spraying fetid sewer water on anyone dumb enough to ignore it?
I am curious how well it works in direct sunlight. All of the clips in the video on the manufacturer’s site are filmed at night, when it would be super obvious.
All this hand-wringing about what could be done about this bridge forgets one thing. Those truck drivers that ignore signs and red lights? Fuck 'em.
This is the closest I’ve come to a solution as well. Instead of making the bridge “no overheight vehicles,” make it “no trucks”. You’d have to come up with a definition that RVs and uhauls and coaches and pickups with tall trailers obey, though (and also not include city buses in that definition).
Presumably/hopefully, Megabus* drivers are more attentive than truck drivers. The Durham Megabus stop is a couple of blocks from here, according to Google Maps. (Though there was a low-clearance Megabus incident in Syracuse.)
*Double-decked, for those who haven’t seen one
I’d prefer spinning saw blades to a wedge, seems like it would make a cooler sound.
They can turn left or right at the intersection (which you’ll observe is where they always get hauled off to). If memory serves the official truck route involves skipping that street altogether.
That was impressive. I’d really like to see some prankster change the sign to the classic Bond intro.
The official detour is to take a right onto Main and bop down Buchanan. If you end up turning on Peabody it’s a much bigger pain both left and right… Left on Peabody involves backtracking up the one-way-north Duke St. Right on Peabody means a 165 degree left turn (really two separate turns in quick succession) onto Buchanan at the high-traffic Main St. intersection.
A lot of this truck traffic is actually probably getting onto the Durham Freeway, so this is actually slightly less bad than depicted.
I bet it’s more likely they’re over-worked and underpaid. And they’re much smarter than me, I’m sure. I don’t have the exact answer.
We don’t live in a golden age of infrastructure maintenance, so please excuse me if I wasn’t jumping to the conclusion that “Everything’s been tried and it doesn’t work.”
It just looks like, in this case, someone decided it’s not worth the money to fix it or close it to trucks, not that they couldn’t. That’s not a slight on their intelligence.
Roads get changed all the time, usually because enough people complain, or people get tired of cleaning up after idiots. Lombard Street used to be a straightaway, and it used to be open to tour buses.
Sure, total agreement, this isn’t the most dangerous intersection, by far. They should only fix this one after they’re sure it’s the worst one, and the other ones have been dealt with.
I do think this intersection is a good example of how people kick the can down the road on a systemic problem, when they have individual schmucks to blame for predictable accidents.
Weeeelllllll… I can’t speak to this example. You maybe 100 percent right that they have looked at this issue and the current solution is the best one within budget.
But in general, city planners and engineers can be pretty, uh, under-qualified. Or not willing to listen to outside information. And some people assume they have “gathered more data” than they actually have. But the appeal to authority isn’t always valid, as the authorities can not know what they are doing.
A few years ago they completely drained the local city lake to fix the dam and spill way, and then filled it back up and stocked it. My dad is an avid fisherman and goes almost everyday, living about 3 min away from the lake. He also has a background in herbicides, invasive species and noxious weeds, and was certified to deal with aquatic plants. He warned the city 2 years ago that this aquatic weed had cropped up on the far side of the lake, and once it takes hold, it will slowly choke out everything around it and is very difficult to get rid of. It has a communal root system and you can hack it back, but it doesn’t die. Nothing local eats it, and it chokes out the natural local plants the habitat is used to. It has slowly grown bigger and bigger and by the time other people start demanding they do something about it, it’s going to be much more expensive than if they had attacked it 2 years ago.
Except I don’t agree with that. I think this intersection has probably gotten way more than it’s fair share of spending, probably because of the camera.
There are four 4 lane x 4 lane or larger intersections within a ten block radius of my house. There will be a fatality at one of them this year, as there always is. The city will spend an additional $0.00 on the intersections as a result of this, and they are correct to do so.
I didn’t say it was the best or only example of the problem.
Ground-level rail crossings are a better example of design that has a lot of bells and whistles but an outsize fatality count. Lots of “idiots who don’t pay attention to the signs” and also a lot of “elevated is too expensive, let’s compromise”.
It’s often easy to put all the blame on the knuckleheads, but city planners aren’t infallible, and the best design choices are sometimes shelved for cost over safety.
here’s a financial deterrent!
pass an ordinance which imposes a 100K$ fine for the bridge strike. every trucking company will implement a mandatory route around the 11x8 and rental companies will make you sign a release that you will not drive on that road, or else… you know GPS is in every truck, rental or corporate…
my internet 2¢ for the week
Most of the crashes happen with rentals. You’d think the $10,000+ repair bill that the renters are on the hook for would be sufficient deterrent, and yet. (That said, there are plenty of commercial vehicles that hit it too.)
one would think, but crank it up to 100K and the thought will get real, really quick!
The problem is that, after a few minutes in a Ryder truck, renters forget they’re driving a truck. All the engrams and mental models for driving a car take over. They literally forget that the thing they are driving is as tall as it is, and (regardless of the warning signs or the size of the penalty) believe that they are going to fit. Because they are in a car. Which they are not.
GPS isn’t enough and is actually part of the problem frequently.
You can get specialized for truckers stand alone GPS that includes height restrictions. But, look in Google Maps, Waze, or Apple Maps and find the vehicle type that allows you to set the height (or say you’re a truck) so they know to avoid low overpasses. (I can’t find it in any of them.)
Depending on the versin, a Garmin unit may have the setting.
In today’s world, people have generally given up pre planning and using maps and other local data to pre-plan a route. Punch it into the GPS and it does it all on the fly. Except it probably doesn’t know you’re driving a 12 foot tall vehicle and need special considerations. It blindly sends you on what it thinks is the most efficient route, with no idea that the vehicle doesn’t fit that route.
People blindly follow GPS directions all the time, including driving into rivers and pedestrian walkways.
