My buddy Lane Gold snapped this shot for me recently. It was taken at the Midtown Tunnel Toll Plaza and depicts the danger of letting someone drive your truck who decides to disobey a traffic control device.
My buddy Lane Gold snapped this shot for me recently. It was taken at the Midtown Tunnel Toll Plaza and depicts the danger of letting someone drive your truck who decides to disobey a traffic control device.
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I was a fleet manager for a nationwide truckload carrier for seven years. You’d be surprised how often I’d see this type of thing with my own drivers. I’ve fired guys for hitting bridges, and some of them are real head scratchers-a driver trying to take a 13’6″ truck under an 11’9″ bridge, which you don’t need to check all that closely, because it is obvious as you approach it, that you will not clear it. The driver who hit it said, “My GPS told me to go this way…”
I lived in Binghamton for years, where the Norfolk Southern RR overpass on US 11/Front St is posted 12’1″-so 13’1″ in real life, because NY posts its bridges a foot short. Still not enough to clear a standard road trailer. Once a week, someone hits it, or has to back out after they realize they’re not going to make it.
The best one, though, is the NY 370/Onondaga Lake Parkway from downtown Syracuse out to Liverpool. The former NY Central, now CSX Montreal Secondary line passes over about midway along Onondaga Lake, and is marked 10’9″. The road is posted at both Liverpool and Syracuse, with signs having flashing lights, and the bridge itself, a large through truss bridge, has a reflective yellow strip on the bottom beam. You really have no excuse not to see it. Yet, once a month or so, someone hits it. Amazing!!
I wonder if the driver even knows how to speak or read in English? These things happen all too often and I see semi tractor trailers all the time illegally entering onto parkways and then shearing the entire top off of their trailers under some low overpass. You just can’t cure stupid!