My ex-wife’s family business had a truck driver in Boston that sheared off the top the truck once on a low bridge and stopped traffic for a few hours. The bridge didn’t do anything except get attacked by a truck that was too tall. It was simply a bone-headed move and the driver got fired for it but everyone else had to pay the associated costs.
This is a dead simple concept. If you are driving a vehicle, you are the person in command much like an airline pilot or a ship’s captain that always has full irresponsibility for their vessel. You can’t blame it on anyone else when you make a dumbass mistake.
Most of us don’t have to worry about bridge clearances but judging those things is key part of your job when you have such responsibilities. Just ask every ship captain who has ever damaged a ship running aground no matter what the charts said or the Italian cruise ship captain who managed to kill a bunch of people through negligence.
I am a small plane pilot. If you crash the plane,it is your fault no matter what the charts say. It is time for personal responsibility with these types of situations.
Thule thingies are rooftop racks for bikes, kayaks, etc. Thule and Yakima are two popular brands. You don’t want to smack your bike on low-clearance obstacles. I know this from personal experience.
Yes, the driver is at fault for crashing, but that does not solve the problem of drivers doing this sort of thing quite frequently. A breakable physical barrier or dangling chains would go a long way to solving the problem.
This reminds of my Driver’s Ed class and the one lecture that I actually remember from it.
When you drive you are operating under two sets of laws. There the laws of man. The speed limit, one-way, stop signs and such. These laws are only sometimes enforced. You also operate under the laws of physics and those laws are always enforced.
They’ve identified the driver. He wasn’t hurt. I’d imagine he’s in a lot of trouble.
Photo of the bus after it was pulled out. Looks like the top three feet was peeled back. 2 dead and 3 critical condition. It could have been a lot worse if the bus was going any faster.
I just watched that video. A bunch of the incidents involved rental trucks, from Budget, Ryder and especially Penske. So my guess is that the drivers don’t drive such trucks regularly.
And as for the Miami bus crash, the newer article says the driver was going 40 MPH, way too fast. I’ll bet that the limit there is 25MPH at best.
That Google Street View link is misleading. If he drove into that parking garage at that kind of speed (which on that road, was right after a stop sign) he’d have to have been drunk. It was to the right of the parking garage that he crashed. This Google Street View gives you a better idea.
If you make the bridge 9 feet high, then ten-foot trucks will still hit it. Even if you make it 11 feet, 8 inches, you’ll still get plenty of crashes, as evidenced by links in this thread. No matter how high you make a bridge, it’ll always be possible for some vehicle or another to be taller, and for some idiot or another to try to clear it anyway. The logical solution, then, is not to make all bridges so high that nothing can hit them (that being impossible), but to put signs on all bridges indicating how high they are, and making drivers have the responsibility of heeding those signs. Which, oh look, is what they do.
As a person who has personally crashed a rented 13’ box truck into a 12’8" bridge, I heartily endorse all those in this thread who blame the driver. This is no different than hitting a mailbox. Drivers of vehicles are ultimately responsible for their vehicles.
As to the idea that the clearance should have been higher-- there is always a way around. There has to be; trucks have to make deliveries. That’s the way our whole damn country works. It’s expensive to make a bridge higher (or the ground lower). I’ve got no sympathy for the driver. His route was clearly marked, and he should have known better.
I have a “Thule thingy” (bike rack) on my roof about 9 months of the year. Can make bridges & parking garages on a regular day w/o issue. Yes, I’ve cringed on certain days when going under RR bridges as I remember there’s more height today. Luckily no damage though but that wouldn’t be true if the bike was on the right side of the roof due to the curvature.
I agree with others that there needs to be some sort of non-dangerous physical warning of the bridge height; a PVC pipe hanging horizontally or chains. Signs aren’t enough, warning lights aren’t enough. It’s easy to say it’s the driver’s responsibility but in this case innocent passengers paid the price.
There is also the issue that some bridges have a dip underneath them, so longer vehicles even if they aren’t over the height can still have their front and back wheels higher than the road directly underneath the bridge, thus making the effective height of the vehicle greater in the middle, under the bridge.
I can’t remember which one it was, but one of the overpasses on the way to JFK Airport has signs indicating the height separately for each lane, as it varies.
