Bridges in the US are threaten by truck drivers relying on GPS meant for cars

Is installing a steel beam 10-30 feet before the bridge on either side that difficult?

For a layman that seems like a simple fix to deal with drivers who cannot read the signs. Shift the damage away from the bridge.

Does someone in the town administration make loads of money whenever the bridge is hit and a repair contract is handed out to their brother-in-law's firm?

I hate articles that talk negatively about GPS when they really mean navigation software. GPS allows you to determine where you are. Navigation software tells you where to go.

Two examples: GPS does not spy on you and tracks your every movement. But the navigation software might. GPS doesn’t tell you to go down the wrong road. But the navigation software might. Etc.

In other GPS thoughts, I've wondered if Google is responsible for a bunch of the seeming grid lock. In the past I feel like people drove down the main streets but now, when the main street fills, Google Maps, and probably Apple Maps and the rest, redirect cars to streets with less traffic. Those streets then end up pouring cars into the the main streets further down, jamming up the entire system.

I have no data, it's just a thought as I see the grid lock and every small side street full of cars. I see the main streets going super slow as people from the packed side streets push back into the main streets they avoided earlier. That means the main street itself is running 10x slower than it would otherwise, at least toward the start, as each car that enters at the start has to wait for the hundreds of cars merging in from side streets in front of it. Cars that were not doing that from side streets 20 years ago because their GPS maps were not directing them to

Google maps and Waze does not allow for setting vehicle height

I bought a Garmin unit for my RV, the special one for RVs costs over $500 that avoids low bridges and allows you to set vehicle height. It doesn’t route near as well as Waze nor does it have as good of traffic info. Waze with vehicle height id easily pay $20 a month for, provided I could subscribe and unsubscribe for the winter while my RV is parked

There's a bridge in Melbourne, Australia, called the Montague St bridge that's so (in)famous it has its own website. The average streak without a strike is currently sitting at 42 days. They've even tried putting up tons of signage and low hanging dangly rattle things that trucks will hit before they get squished under the bridge, but it seems to have little effect.

1. https://howmanydayssincemontaguestreetbridgehasbeenhit.com/

There’s a legendary bridge in North Carolina that, fortunately, is not threatened by truck drivers. Rather, it is the threat to improperly driven trucks, and is affectionately known as the “Can Opener”: http://11foot8.com/

I’ve been watching these videos for years and despite adding increasingly prominent warnings and raising the bridge itself eight extra inches, idiots—often in Penske rental trucks—will still drive into the bridge and peel off the top of their box truck.

Bridge strikes data for British Columbia, Canada, for the past several years:

https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/transportation/vehicle-sa...

It does not look like repairs have even begun on the damage from 2023-02-10 (Knight Street, Cambie Overpass). There is still just a big chunk of concrete missing, with rebar sticking out of it, and the large direction sign which was there has yet to be replaced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgjqjrcfYJE

Related, I wish there was a good way for parking garages to advertise their vertical clearances, beyond the headache bar at the entryway.

I was recently invited to a vendor dinner at a nice restaurant in a downtown area with no street parking and I had no transportation option beyond my work truck (clocking in at about 6' 5"). I had to resort to using street view to check the entrances to various parking structures and hope the picture was close enough/the text wasn't too blurry for me to read the warning bar. In the end, it worked! But it was a painful process.

A similar local example of this is UHaulers moving in for their freshman semester in Boston destroying their truck and backing up traffic for hours by getting themselves onto a road with a low overpass. This overpass strips the roof of the truck, and is referred to as getting Storrowed, named for Storrow Drive, the road they shouldn’t be on.

No amount of signage can remedy this, the only way to fix it would be to raise the overpass, or to have the drivers gps route them more appropriately.

This almost happened to me taking a rented U-Haul down the parkways in New York, which have notoriously low overpasses. It was like the 2nd smallest box truck you could rent and I still seem to recall having to pull off to the side of the road and download a trial of some specialty trucker GPS app. This was maybe 5 years ago.

Okay, so I thought I would check this in my "gps" and I see OsmAnd+ from f-droid lets you enter vehicle parameters, including height, and will avoid low overpasses, given the height restriction is tagged in OSM data. You can also enter a type of vehicke and the navigation will avoid roads you shouldn't enter (dangerous load, no entrance for HGV, etc.). Those drivers should just use a better software.

> “I swear, we could take that bridge out and not replace it and people would go in the river.

Incredibly funny, and also incredibly sad, because it's true. Weren't there cases of people dying from dehydration after being misled in some desert by their GPS?

This is a sad, sad issue of culture and education.

Typo

threaten -> threatened

Current HN title

> Bridges in the US are threaten by truck drivers relying on GPS meant for cars

I had wanted to do this as a project, but a truck driver told me they already used special navigation software that took their clearances into consideration. Seems like not all of the drivers do this…

I honestly wish truck drivers had their very own highway. I hate sharing the road with these beastly vehicles. Especially those super aggressive truck drivers, that ride your butt and pass you when you're doing 80 in a 70.