You make it sound like it's normal that people would expect that they can drive into a bridge without checking the height first - as if it's the bridge's fault for being too low. Why don't the drivers check?
Because they're not used to driving trucks. Modern light weight cargo vehicles accelerate and brake as though they are personal cars. Spend an hour or two behind the wheel of one and you're liable to forget that you have this huge box behind you that extends well over the height of the cab, the part that is in your immediate field of view. It takes some serious situational awareness to keep that at the front of your thoughts when driving an unfamiliar vehicle on unfamiliar roads.
The basic assumption people make is that the roads they know or that are indicated by their navigator are the roads that they can drive on. I don't recall even if my navigator has a way of setting the vehicle height, I should check that.
Absolutely. And then you do it for a couple of hours concentrating on the road and driving the car between the lines nicely widthwise and you'll forget it when you need it most.
I've done a lot of driving, some of it boxtrucks and larger and when you switch vehicles it is a thing that you need to remind yourself of constantly. The easiest solution would be to dig that road out to standard depth, the next best would be to drop it from all navigation systems so that at least people that do not know about it won't try to use it.
Somewhat related to this is the problem of children being left in hot/cold cars accidentally.
When our son was very young (< 2 years old), my girlfriend/wife was usually the one to take him to daycare in the morning. Occasionally she would have to leave for work early or was running late and would ask me to take him instead. This seemed to me to be a perfect storm to have him left behind in the car when I went to work: not used to having him there, I might drive directly to work "on autopilot" and get out and leave him asleep in his car seat.
I often wondered if this was at the heart of kids being left in hot cars.
Anyway, I forced myself to get into the habit of always turning around and checking that the car seat was empty before getting out the car, every single time, just in case.
Of course, it never happened, but I can see how easy it is to forget stuff like this when you're simply not used to doing it.
That’s exactly why it happens so often. Most of us live (well, until recently lived) lives of quiet routine, and a quiet child in the back seat is surprisingly easy to overlook when that’s not your routine.
> And then you do it for a couple of hours concentrating on the road and driving the car between the lines nicely widthwise and you'll forget it when you need it most.
Must be different locations being different.
But where I'm from you couldn't remotely just drive regardless of your vehicle height. You'd smash into something within minutes.
Here the right hand lane is up to truck standards and if it isn't it is very clearly marked as such, I wouldn't even know of a road that isn't explicitly closed for trucks that you could not take an 18 wheeler on.
But - and this is the crucial bit - the main distinguishing factor between what is a truck and what counts as a van is different in Europe than in the US/Canada. In the US/Canada on my normal 'lightweight' license I can drive a 10 ton truck, in Europe I'm limited to 3500 KG which puts an automatic limit on the size vehicle, a typical sprinter or boxvan would not be higher than 3.5 meters and everybody else will need a class 'C' driving license at a minimum and once you pass that you shouldn't need to be taught about vehicle height any more. There is a loophole called a BE trailer but those are very rare and the people that drive them tend to know their limitations.
Even so there are plenty of professional drivers in those crash videos that fall for it just the same. I'll give the rental van drivers a pass as long as they cross on the green light and they're only a few inches high. Usually the height of the truck will vary by that much just based on acceleration / deceleration and angle of the 5th wheel hitch if it has one as well as the angle of the road approaching the barrier and the length of the vehicle. If you measure the vehicle while stationary on flat ground you might think you can get away with it when you really can't.
I used to drive under this bridge almost every day. It is remarkably well signed. But some people just can’t be reached. I’m reminded of the elective attention test.
I am pretty confident an abnormally low bridge would have fewer accidents — the fact that it looks like it's just high enough doesn't help matters.
Perhaps the simplest solution is to introduce a light hanging (eg rubber) plate to make the underpass appear even shorter so people do stop and look at the signs.
THE POINT IS that the height difference isn’t that “massive” as you describe it - LOOK AT ALL THE VIDEOS (that’s right: plural) - it’s clear that the lack of clearance is not so obvious.
Not when 99.999% of your driving experience tells you that bridges aren’t a threat. These are primarily rental trucks, and people are not accustomed to thinking that their head is several feet below the top of their vehicle.
> You make it sound like it's normal that people would expect that they can drive into a bridge without checking the height first
1. Most people would correctly expect that road-approved vehicles would clear all bridges.
2. This one is literally a couple of inches out for clearance; it looks like the truck is 12ft (or whatever the current bridge height is), which is probably what the truck's height indication is. It's not unreasonable for the driver to expect to clear the bridge even knowing the height of both, especially if they match closely.
3. The bridge was recently lifted to its current height - if this is a 'local' driver, they probably expect all vehicles to clear it now, knowing it got lifted.
