Plowed snow pushed to the outer walls of highways, notably on elevated roadways, can form a ramp to launch you over the edge. It happened to this guy…
Yikes.
An acquaintance of mine was head of maintenance at a large building. Years ago, I asked him what the chute was on the side of his parking ramp (like this, but this is just a random picture I found). My WAG had always been that it was so a truck could be parked at the bottom and the janitorial staff could toss garbage bags into it instead of hauling them down.
Turns out it’s a snow chute. A dump truck parks at the bottom and a front end loader can push the snow into it. One of their contractors dumped the snow over the side one day and it landed on the trunk of a car with enough force to destroy the car. The owner was in the car when it happened, driving in to the parking ramp.
As for the snow ramp thing. That was getting scarily common for a while. Over the past few years the DPW seems to be making an effort to deal with it. After the snow is cleared mostly cleared, they come back with dump trucks and front end loaders to removed the snow from the sides and get rid of the ramps.
One of my aunts was the passenger of a car that flipped like that. Luckily she didn’t go over the side, just rolled over.
February of last year such a snowramp caused a car to go off the I-205 bridge between Oregon and Washington, and plunge into the Columbia river, killing the driver.
https://www.kptv.com/news/family-of-man-whose-car-slid-off-i-205-bridge-during-winter-storm-files-wrongful/article_0061b2f0-8e97-11ec-8aa7-0775580b45a2.html
There was a case like that in Montreal some years ago. Somebody flipped off the Metropolitan Blvd and was killed. What part of “Too fast for conditions” don’t you understand?
Had a similar incident here several years ago.
Adding to the accident was the driver driving too fast, and having bald tires.
Deadly combination of all three things.
During a storm in Minnesota, you might see some of these building up. After the storm, the DOT comes along and removes this excess snow. My take is they recognized the problem years ago. These are my tax dollars at work and I support it.
I used to work, play with, and even drive in car races on frozen lakes. This is a constant problem in years of much snow. The race cars can take it, but your average daily driver, not so much.
If you just drive properly, and keep your car in the lane where it belongs, this no problem.
How much tax money should we spend to protect idiots from the consequences of their idiotic actions?
We’re also protecting the people below them from having a car drop on their heads like some Monty Pythonesque fatality.
There aren’t many vehicles that weigh 16 tons.
Semis go over the sides of bridges too.
What about the person that was going the correct speed for conditions and hits some ice that they weren’t expecting because it’s 40ish degrees and raining?
What about the time I was driving well under the limit on a freshly plowed freeway and spun out because a plow cut from the far right lane to the far left lane (earlier, before I was there) leaving a big ridge of snow from one side to the other? I didn’t see it until it was to late to do anything about it.
Up here in “dat dere Frozen Tundra, eh?” we’ve had snowramps for decades. Something to keep in mind, they’re not in your lane, so you won’t deal with them unless you’re in a crash… or just accidentally driving off the road.
It’s the equivalent of driving on a normal highway and careening off the road and down an embankment. No one would say “Damn you, Highway Department, it’s your fault I drifted off the road and flipped my car!”
Though I’ll admit, careening off the road, getting air and landing three stories below is a bit more inconveniencing.
Up thread I mentioned my aunt being in a car that rolled over on one of those. That was about 30 years ago.
Ramps like this along the sides of the “Harvard Bridge” between Boston and Cambridge have launched cars over the edge and into the Charles River in the past.
Joey, it was the whole tone of this article many of us objected to. For example “drivers need to be warned”. Well, from the pictures the readers here could easily see the big piles of snow along the sides–quite unlike the situation with black ice which we can’t see.
Basically the issue with snow and roads is that there are a limited number of staff to deal with the issue in a short period of time and that the technologies only partially work (pushing snow out of the way and de-icing). So as Hari says the drivers need to change their behavior.
Thanks to this thread, I just did. Had to drive to The Big City for a meeting, and I left early, so I could get off the freeway before I hit the “Can O’ Worms”. It’s a multi-story maze of overpasses that I was afraid would be full of snow ramps (more like icy quarter-pipes).
So who knows, I was probably over-cautious. But I did find a reference to a car sailing off that very spot a year ago. And I did get to see some quaint neighborhoods on my detour.
People go to school for years, and are paid large sums of money by highway departments, to design things like roadway embankments to make them less likely to cause a car to flip when one of the 99.99999% of drivers who are imperfect ends up outside of the intended space. And there are bodies of law around when a state or its contractors might even be liable for negligence in not following the standards for something like that.
If “just stay in your damn lane” was the only principle, we wouldn’t need medians or guardrails or warning signs either. The fact that there’s a concrete barrier against which these snowramps are formed indicates that the state feels some duty to protect drivers from their own (and others’) negligence.
You seem rather disdainful of people who don’t drive perfectly. Are there really no idiots in your life that you care about?
I understand the concern about tax dollars - resources certainly aren’t infinite - but I wonder how much cost would really be incurred by snow ramp mitigation efforts. It’s also worth noting that according to the OP’s article, IDOT already requires snow ramp mitigation:
IDOT’s guidelines call for snow removal to “continue until snow is removed from bridge decks and adjacent to walls or guardrail where ramping may occur.”
We’re also protecting the passengers in cars driven by “idiots.”
All I know is the Illinois Department of Transportation has an unfortunate acronym that kept making me think it said “IDIOT” throughout the article.
I can see the piles of snow, but before I read this article I would have had no idea those piles of snow presented any sort of hazard.