Whats the usual penalty in SA for this? New Ferrari if SA citizen or flayed alive on a street corner if poor immigrant-slave from Nepal?
What a lousy Monday.
Crazy! Here’s 3 more:
This is why highway construction sites always have signs everywhere saying “Lower bed after dumping load” or whatever.
Dumb truck!
Looks like this is a fairly common failure mode.
…thought… interlock that will not allow running the truck with raised bed at higher than 1st speed (to allow raising the bed and dumping its content by slowly driving forward, but do not allow going to road speed)? Two switches, one on the gearbox/shaft, one on the bed, and kill the engine?
Also, another option; one switch on bed, one on the gas pedal, and a beeper. If gas is pressed, and the bed is raised, a beeping is heard. With possibility to suppress it for short time, perhaps.
Multiple switches can be ganged into serial-parallel configuration for increased reliability. Or Hall sensors with rugged housing, and magnets, can be used, Or induction proximity sensors; no moving parts, nothing to break except fatigue shakeoff of the wires, which can be prevented by correct mounting.
Hard to believe there’s not something like that in place already. Or that just driving with the bed up makes the vehicle drive so differently you couldn’t help but notice. The number of times this happens perplexes me.
It’s not THAT often. We don’t see the billions of uneventful drives when all went okay. Most drivers will never get this happen to them.
This happened to the Burlington Skyway (near Hamilton, Ontario) about a year ago:
The driver in that case was intoxicated and faced charges.
Wait, does it require millions of dollars of retrofitting to solve the problem or is it okay?
Schroedinger’s failure mode.
Its probability function collapses to a given state when you post a video of it on U2be.
Something in between, I’d say. The calculation is better done by insurance companies who are at the ultimate receiving end of the mishaps.
Given the fairly low cost of implementation of the interlock, I can see it incentived via some token discount on the vehicle insurance.
[quote=“shaddack, post:12, topic:63900”]
Given the fairly low cost of implementation of the interlock
[/quote]So, what, five bucks of electronics? Sure.
Then you need to take all the dump trucks off the jobsites to get the work done, which can’t happen at once, but let’s say it takes four hours to drill a hole in the cab, run the wiring in from the interlock, and have your mechanic make sure the whole system is working. Oh, and he makes thirty bucks an hour. But, what’ve we got, ten million dump trucks? I mean, this is going to be across every maker and all lines. Even if it’s five bucks for the part it’s millions of dollars.
In comparison to how often this happens? Doesn’t seem worth it.
Drivers would find a way around all of those.
In Greece, as in many countries, buckling your seatbelt in a taxi is considered an insult to the driver’s skill. When taxi drivers in Greece started driving cars which have an alarm that beeps if a passenger hasn’t buckled their seatbelt, somebody started selling seatbelt buckles with no belt attached which you could click in to silence the alarm.
You can put “lower bed” signs up all you want, but it won’t do any good. Witness the low bridge videos. That bridge even has flashing lights, and people still smash into it on a regular basis.
Which can be done at any time, when the truck is already getting serviced. Or just installed in the new ones and be an optional retrofit for the old ones.
Sure. But I don’t think anybody wants to drive with a raised truck bed and intentionally cause the resulting mayhem.
Things that get in the way will be ignored or defeated. Engineering it well will be to be helpful, and perceived as helpful, instead of being a hindrance, is an art.
That’s what a frame in front of the bridge is for. Smash into the frame, keep the bridge intact.
I know someone whose student project was to investigate bridge bashing - trucks hitting low railways bridges. It wasn’t thought to be a serious problem.
The scale of the problem discovered led to a 20 year program to fit everything from flashing lights to sensors and alarms depending on the likely seriousness of collisions.
It is possible that, as with deaths due to police shooting in the US, nobody has bothered to record the statistics on the assumption that events are rare - and then it may turn out that they are not.
Durham, NC has a very famous low bridge. 11’ - 8", to be exact. There is signage several blocks beforehand. There are flashing lights that come on.
And yet, once a month the webcam]1 gets action. Truck drivers are ultimately responsible in these cases and dump truck cases, no amount of interlocks will stop them.
I dunno. Considering the number you can find on the internet, and considering those were in the presumably VAST minority that were actually caught on video–it seems like there’s an unexpectedly high number. Enough for me to still be perplexed as to how so many drivers can go any length of time at a high rate of speed and not notice this big, heavy, wind resistant, mirror-blocking, probably noisy and shaking and shuddering thing up in the air behind him. Wonder if alcohol/drugs are the rule rather than the exception in these cases.
I actually can understand it more with low bridges. Even with lots of signs, eventually someone in the course of their normal driving is just not going to register the warning. There’s always gonna be somebody daydreaming or just zoning out and not paying attention to such things. But driving 50+ mph with a truck bed raised up, with all the differences in the driving experience that’s got to cause, just seems completely brain dead.
