Inspired by news report of yet another bus getting stuck under a bridge, and an article about an underpass under a bridge in my region that has been eating vans for the last three decades:
Do you know the height of your vehicle by heart? I.e. without frantically searching for the vehicle’s papers while standing before an obstacle.
No idea how tall my car/SUV (Ford Mach-E) is, but I can see over the top of it. I’m 5’9’‘, so maybe 5.5’ or so. In any case, I’m not likely to hit a bridge that any other regular traffic can fit under.
In the US we have the 11Foot8 bridge. There’s plenty of others like it all over the US, but someone records and uploads all the crashes from that one.
Based on those videos, I think a lot of people aren’t unsure as to whether or not they’ll clear it, but rather they don’t give it any thought. Either they don’t see it coming or don’t think they’re anywhere near it. IOW, they’re hitting it at full speed.
Something else worth noting is that a lot of the trucks that hit the bridge (in my link) are rental trucks. Likely being driven by someone that’s never had to give any thought to their vehicle size.
I drive a Mazda MX-5 (Miata). If that car doesn’t fit under a given obstacle then that space is not meant for cars. (I didn’t vote in the poll because I assumed it was only for drivers of taller than average vehicles).
Most fire apparatus has vehicle height printed (decaled) on the top of the windshield so all one needs to do is literally look up.
I used to have a car, with a roof rack for bikes. Then I got an SUV & installed the roof rack there. Bike on the roof I take a normal local road with a low bridge, not thinking anything of it because I’ve gone under it many a time with the bike on the car’s roof. As I start to enter the bridge (tunnel?) I cringe when I remember that I’m now higher than I used to be & I can’t stop in about 18". Not gonna end the way you were expecting; it was high enough for me to make it thru w/o issue but I do know a number of people who have forgotten their bike was up there when they tried to pull into their garage.
IN NY state, thruways are for cars only, no commercial vehicles allowed; even a pickup with commercial tags can be pulled over. A couple of times a week some trucker can openers their vehicle/trailer on a low bridge on one of the Long Island parkways; more often than not the videos I see are of professional truck drivers, not rental trucks. Some of the bridges are as low a 7’9".
I was driving the Sprinter up to NE for an event; there was an accident on the interstate-now-parking-lot. My passenger pulls out her phone & looks for a detour, which of course included a parkway. No, nope, no way. That’s a car GPS on your phone. I don’t know the height of this Sprinter as it’s not mine & I don’t know how low any of the bridges are (see above paragraph). I might make some, I might make some if I’m in the correct lane but I am not giving him a sunroof. She was pissed that I wouldn’t take her detour but my stubbornness resulting in our arrival, late but w/o any damage.
My pickup truck with nothing on it is 68" (5’8").
My pickup truck with carry rack is 72" (6’).
My pickup truck with carry rack & fly rod carrier is 77" (6’5").
My pickup truck with carry rack & kayak saddles (but no kayaks) is 84" (7’).
My pickup truck with carry rack & kayaks is 104" (8’8").
My pickup truck with everything, and towing my camper is 126" (10’6").
Back in the 90s I leased a Ford Expedition. I had a parking pass at the Sinking Ship garage (for those of you familiar with Seattles Pioneer Square). I normally pulled into the first entrance and parked. There wasn’t much extra clearance, but it fit. One day that area was full, and I pulled into the second enterance. Apparently that one was a few inches shorter. Ripped my roof rack off in front of a group of tourists on the underground tour.
We had a booth at a trade show in St. Louis one year. The boss rented a SUV, but the rental company gave us a minivan. That van scraped the support beams of the parking garage every time we drove into it - horrible sound! The rental car company never said anything (I guess they don’t look up top when they do the inspection).
I picked “I don’t know” because I don’t know exactly. I do know it’s somewhere between 5 and 7 feet , so I wouldn’t try to go under if the sign said the clearance was 6 feet.
There’s one parkway near my house where this seems to happen at least once a week. According to my husband, there are two reasons it happens. One is that too many truckdrivers use a free navigation app on their phone rather than buying one meant for trucks. And that app directs them to parkways- but if you don’t drive in NY much , you won’t know commercial vehicles aren’t allowed on parkways. And the second is that many clearance signs are deliberately not exactly accurate, so a 13 foot vehicle may fit under a bridge that has a sign saying the clearance is 12 feet, 6 inches. .
Are you saying that would cause people to hit it because they’re assuming it’s wrong and that they therefore assume they’ll fit even when the sign says otherwise?
Another way the signs can actually be incorrect is when the road gets redone. If they add two inches of asphalt, the bridge is now two inches lower. The city has to occasionally lower the road under a bridge to keep trucks from hitting it after decades of re-asphalting. Running pipes (drains, electrical conduit etc) along the bottom of the bridge can also cause problems.
Another issue can be that some drivers think their vehicle is lower but just never realized they’ve only gone under the bridge with a full load and never empty.
Yep. Some looking around I did today found people saying that their state requires a 12 inch buffer while other people say their location has a 3 inch buffer. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that a lot of people assume everything is done the way they are used to so there are definitely people who assume the buffer is always 12 inches. Also some who assume it’s always 3 inches, but that isn’t as big a problem.
I rented a box van for moving a bunch of stuff one time, and overhead was not an issue, because I stuck to the main roads that were suitable for that thing. The one thing I noticed, never having driven one of those before, was the tailswing. I taught myself very quickly (not through a mistake) that it could not be driven like a car and had to go around corners very carefully.
Our Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk is about 68" (I Googled this when we bought it a few months ago), which means DH is slightly taller than it is when he stands next to it. It is a few inches taller than I am. Not 100% sure if that height figure includes the luggage rack on top, but that’s most likely less than 6" anyway.
It’s also true on interstates but very true on the NY parkways - they have many very lovely, low stone archway bridges. One lane may be higher/lower than the other lane, or with the low, tight archways, you may make it if you take your half out of the middle/highest point in the archway but not in either of the individual lanes.
In Spain there is often a bar way before a bridge suspended at the height of the bridge: if you bang against the bar, often suspended with chains or with chains hanging down, you know you are too tall. People usually stop then.
I have never seen them in Germany and I ignore what they are called in German, and the wikipage does not have a translated page either in English nor in German, but it is such a simple and useful concept that it must exist.
Actually, the Spanish wikipage shows one in Germany:
There are numerous videos in the net about coaches and trucks crashing against brigdes, but they all seem to be in English. I wonder what the reason for that is.
My car is just under 1.6 m.
