(I have no idea what big penny means.)
The bridge is on S Pennsylvania Ave in Lansing, MI, hence “Penny”. Construction has routed more people through there than normal lately increasing the bridges hunger.
If there’s one thing people that rent trucks or RVs never learn, it’s the height of their vehicle (and that yes the flashing overheight lights are in fact for you).
Source: Used to live near there.
They’ll follow Google maps anywhere blindly. Rational thinking is turned off.
That’s how people drove into a lake, under a train, het themselves stuck in too narrow streets, arrive on the wrong country and so on.
“Fools bridge” from Saint-Petersburg saying hi!
It’s just below the height of the most popular small truck, Gazelle - despite the poster saying: “It’s low, Gazelle doesn’t fit” (in addition to a normal sign), drivers keep checking that.
That bridge needs more 11’8"
I read the site but couldn’t find why the sign says 12’4 if it’s really 11’8"?
Edit: Thanks for all the answers everyone. Now the 11’8"+8" makes so much more sense.
They actually raised it back in 2019.
http://11foot8.com/raising-11foot8/
It didn’t help much, obviously.
IIRC, they didn’t raise it because of the crashes. It’s a privately owned rail line and they don’t care about that because the bridge itself wasn’t being damaged. It needed to be renovated anyway so they raised it to be level with the nearby at-grade crossing while they were at it.
The fact that 22 of those 75 were just this year reinforces my suspicion that drivers have been getting enormously worse recently.
I cycle a lot around my city and no cap I believe that they fucking gift driver licenses in cereal boxes nowadays.
I cannot begin to describe the enormous stupidity one can found on the road.
(And not only drivers, electric scooters are almost worse. At least when I have an accident with them they are the ones who take the worst part).
What are our bets on what forever chemical is our generations leaded gasoline?
I haven’t done an actual statistical analysis, but relying on my human over-ability to notice patterns and a tendency to laugh at the 11’8" bridge channel on Youtube (said bridge is located in Durham NC and I’m a lowercase t tarheel through and through), most of the trucks that hit the bridge’s crash barrier are Ryder, Penske or Enterprise box trucks, which are rental vehicles available, for reasons completely beyond my comprehension, to anyone with a Class C driver’s license in the state of North Carolina. Also over-represented are RVs that have their rooftop air conditioners scraped off. The vast majority of drivers that hit the 11’8" bridge are amateurs driving a vehicle significantly larger than they’re used to with an absolute height significantly taller than the roof of the cab.
It’s the very occasional semi truck that leads to the most spectacular, and baffling, crashes. They don’t rent articulated trucks to just anyone over 23 with a credit card.
I love how gnarly the underside of the bridge is. Everyone thinks they’re the exception.
