I don't normally have much love for watching people get hurt, but there's a youtube channel I check every now and again called yovo68, AKA 11foot8plus8. There is a bridge in Durham, North Carolina which paths a regular motor vehicle street under some train tracks; due to Reasons™ this underpass is too short for many/most trucks and tall vehicles: 12'4" as of late 2019, but before that it was 11'8" clearance. Because it's a train trestle, any collisions are, shall we say, going to find in the trestle's favor. The locals refer to it as "the can opener" because every single collision is the vehicle top (90%+ of the time, the roof) experiencing physics with the crash bar and/or bridge underside.
This makes it sound like it's a sneaky bridge or somehow hard to realize there's a problem before running into it. That's the thing: it's not.
There's a light in front of it with special height sensors to not only trip a looooong red but also turn on a gigantic all-caps OVERHEIGHT MUST TURN sign. Said sign starts flashing when the light finally goes green, warning truck drivers to for the love of insurance premiums turn left or right. There's an impact bar painted warning yellow directly in front of the bridge, under the light. There's SO GODDAMN MANY HEIGHT SIGNS in the standardized height restriction warning format of the USA which are completely unambiguous if you've been on a road before. They do everything short of assign a government employee to walk up to your vehicle while you're at the light and roll down your window and personally tell you to turn.
The youtube channel, which as best I can tell is just some guy's webcams aimed at the intersection and left running for later review, recorded 150 crashes in between April 2008 and late 2019, when they raised the clearance slightly. You'll notice that that's something like 14 crashes a year. Between the bridge raising and now is only 28 crashes, a more reasonable(???) ~9 per year, which suggests raising the bridge helped at least.
Again, my sadistic appetite is pretty low and easily overwhelmed by concern/worrying for other people, even strangers. But this particular channel functions pretty nicely as the equivalent of junk food for what little appetite I have because:
- everyone making this mistake had a LOT of chances not to, my god
- serious injuries are pretty rare! Not 0, but usually these crashes don't send anyone to the hospital (in fact many videos show the driver getting out to stare and/or throw their hat on the ground, clearly 100% okay)
- oh my god the property damage though. Every seen a box truck rip off its roof so hard the arresting of momentum made it pop a wheelie? Here you go. There's a bunch of these.
- also the bridge was (/is?) slightly higher than advertised. They have SO many chances not to fuck it up.
- like, by "so many chances not to fuck it up" I mean a lot of people DO turn! For every crash there are a stupendous number of drivers who go "oh yeah ok I'll turn" and do so, to say nothing of drivers just taking alternate routes to begin with. There's at least one video demonstrating this!
- but sometimes there's footage of some chucklefuck driving into it at speed, reversing out, and driving off as if their roof isn't 2/5th peeled... with a note in the video description that they were seen hitting ANOTHER BRIDGE MINUTES LATER ELSEWHERE IN TOWN.
Anyways. If you want to rubberneck a bunch of truck accidents where mostly nobody got hurt and the driver responsible perhaps shouldn't have run that red (on top of EVERYTHING ELSE telling them not to do it)... there's a decade and a half demonstrating what taking the roof off a box truck looks like!
