I have reoccurring nightmares about bridges & overpasses where I end up driving off the end of an overpass under construction, or off of a bridge into water, or along a bridge that gets closer and closer to the water until it’s submerged.
I saw this picture today, and I now have a major case of heebie jeebies:
Thank you, Snopes, for letting me know about the existence of this thing, so I can avoid it. I think I will do so by NEVER DRIVING ANYWHERE IN VIRGINIA, EVER.
Huh, I thought this was going to be a little bit more like my fear, which is the fear of just missing the curve and driving right off the edge of a perfectly good bridge. I don’t know why, but I always get this irrational fear whether I’m driving or not. I have this image of the bridge curving, my car going straight and crashing onto the highway below.
Thanks for sharing though, now your fear freaks me out too! 
Jaade, your fear is more like mine. I’m scared I’m going to get in an accident on a bridge and go flying off the edge. I *thought * this was irrational and that bridges were surely better built than that…until I read about it happening in Charleston, SC. I don’t know if you’ve ever driven there, but a couple of the bridges are incredibly high and seem very rickety. Some guy in a Jeep Cherokee lost control in the rain one night and flew through the guardrail. I hate bridges.
I get scared that when I drive under an overpass a semi is going to fall off the bridge and smush me flat. Aiee! This started happening after I saw a particularly gruesome crash on I-65, where a mobile home really was smashed flat as a pancake under a semi. Terrible. I don’t know why I get in the car anymore, ever.
I have dreams like that all the time. I’m desperately afraid of bridges, but I can usually drive over them as long as I stay as far away from the railing as I can possibly get–and I’m sure other drivers hate me for being in the fast lane. 
My parents live just outside Charleston, and I’ve seen some of their new “safer” bridges under construction. All I can say is yikes.
But, thanks to links provided by the Dope that I never should have clicked on, the Millau Bridge now features prominently in all my bridge nightmares.
As a kid, and into my adulthood, I’d have dreams that I was driving along a road that went into the water, and I couldn’t stop. I’d wake up with my heart racing.
I’m not afraid of bridges, but I cross a very narrow, high bridge going to work in the dark of the morning. What bothers me are the oncoming trucks who can’t seem to stay on their side of the yellow line. It’s not like I can go anywhere!! Idiots!! I always have an escape plan in mind for when I’m plummeting in to the Potomac. :o
I guess I’m the only person who’s now on maps.google.com looking at how far this is from my house and wondering when I can go down there just to drive through that thing. It looks so cool - a bit scary - but really, really freaking cool.
Modern Marvels on the History channel did a show on it.
It’s pretty neat, yeah, but nothing to freak out about. Just a tunnel. 
Actually, the CBBT and the MMBT are two different things- the MBBT crosses the James River; the CBBT crosses the Chesapeake Bay. One is 4.x miles long, the other is (I believe) 17.
When we moved down here, we had to drive in on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. It’s a bridge that’s about 20 miles long with two 1-mile tunnels in the middle. I hated driving in that thing. If I want to go to Richmond, I have to take another tunnel and when my husband was working in the shipyard, we had to take another tunnel to get there.
Needless to say, I’ve gotten over my uneasiness at driving through the tunnels. I like looking at them when I fly out of Norfolk, since when you’re dirving you don’t really get to see where they disappear and reappear, but you can see it from the air.
The link provided about this structure has the following passage:
I don’t get it. If they do need to expand it, are they going to push the tunnel sections down 10 feet deeper into the mud and rebuild another island 200 feet further back?
I don’t mind suspension bridges, because somehow the towers make it seem “safe.” But this bridge freaks me out every time I drive over it. Very high, and small guard-rails. Just a great view and a looooooooooong drop to the water! :eek:
I have nightmares about driving up on the cables of suspension bridges. I also have ones where I’m driving on a bridge, and all of a sudden I notice that there’s a big gap in the bridge, and my car goes flying off.
I guess the bridgeaphobiacs aren’t keen on the original Tacoma Narrows-AKA Galloping Gertie.
Some recent reading was a NTSB report about a towboat/barge that went off channel and hit a support pier for I-40, dropping out a 503’ section of the interstate. 8 cars and 3 tractor-trailers drove either into the river or onto the collapsed section of roadway.
Driving along, change the radio station…WTF HAPPENED TO THE ROAD? :eek:
I feel the same way about the Tappan Zee Bridge. shudder
And I even have to pay to go over the damned thing.
Or you could be driving under a railway bridge and have a train fall on your car.
I grew up in that neighbourhood and know exactly where this was; I went to the school mentioned in the second link, but before it was Leslie McFarlane Public School, it was the hell-school known as Whitby Senior Public School. I escaped, grew up, and went to university before they built the bridge.
I have a similar fear of bridges. I think I owe it all to one bridge. In this area we had the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. When I was a kid I was afraid of the Skyway Bridge before I even saw it. I’d have nightmares that it was something like one of those hot wheels circley things and I’d worry that my car would fall off. When I did finally have to go over the bridge it was not as bad as my nightmares but still pretty scary. Eventually I was old enough to drive and my family moved across the bridge to Sarasota for a summer but we went back and forth a lot. If I drove, I went the long way through Tampa. I think I only got up the nerve to drive over the Skyway a few times and it made me very nervous. I had a small car and it didn’t have a lot of pickup and I was afraid I was going to roll backwards off the bridge. Eventually we moved back to St. Pete.
My fears were not exactly unfounded when a freighter rammed the bridge and knocked down one of the spans in 1980 causing several people to fall to their deaths. Thankfully I was not on the bridge at the time but the images of that span just ending and the car hanging on the edge still haunt me. The incline was so great that you really couldn’t tell that part of the bridge was gone until you got to the top. Damn, I still get the shivers looking at those pictures and thinking about it.
For some crazy reason, about 4 years later I decided to work across the bridge in Bradenton. The new bridge was still uncompleted so this meant that the remaining span was used and it was one lane in each direction. It was even worse than driving it before since now you only had a thin line separating you from oncoming traffic. Plus when you got to the top, if you looked over at the other span you just saw it disappear into space. It was unnerving. I eventually realized I could not drive an extra hour or two through Tampa all the time and had to drive over the bridge. I kept my eyes forward most of the time, my hands would get really sweaty (damn they get sweaty just thinking about this) and I’d quickly take one hand off the wheel to wipe off the sweat. In high winds you could feel the bridge sway. When it rained or was foggy you prayed a lot. They closed the bridge if the weather was really bad. Sometimes I just couldn’t get up the nerve to drive it.
The new bridge is not without it’s faults and it’s also unnerving but it’s 1000 times better than the horror that was the original Sunshine Skyway Bridge.
Hey! I can see your nightmare from here!
It’s pretty freaky from below, too, especially in a small boat.
