Previously:
11 Foot 8 (Part 1) 11 Foot 8 (Part 2)
Leejay Wu_ and Nick Brown_ first drew my attention to this tweet a few weeks ago. It’s happening, folks…they’re raising the bar. (heh See what I did there?)
There are a bunch of different takes from the Internet Peanut Gallery on this decision to correct a decades-long bit of physical infra tech debt, the most common of which is of the “sadness”/”end of an era” variety. There is also a fair bit of vitriol (because this is the Internet, folks), and a few of the kinds of comments that I covered before - The drivers are stupid Why don’t they just…, etc. A fun new wrinkle: now we get to observe a whole bunch of My friend , is an Engineer… and Why didn’t they…?
…and of course because it’s an improvement to public infra you’ve got the “Get off my lawn!” crowd grousing about how it’s a waste of taxpayer money. What I love about this particular brand of commentary: so far as I can tell the project is being funded by the NC Railroad Company (the private company that owns the rails). Classic!
For my part, I’m just curious to see the results. Presumably this will lead to less frequent rental truck crashes, but they’re only raising the thing 8 inches. I have a feeling 11foot8.com may not be out of business just yet.
Perhaps also worth noting: this bridge has been ripping the tops off of trucks for at least two decades (the 11foot8 archive only goes back to 2008) without anyone doing anything about it. Then a couple of igotw posts about it drop, and - lo and behold! - a few months later they’re raising the bridge. I know that c
_orrelation doesn’t mean causation, but I’d call that timing pretty suspicious, wouldn’t you? _