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Bullseye! River roads tied up as truck drivers discover what CARS ONLY means
By adamg on Fri, 09/02/2016 - 5:22pm
Drivers on the river roads seem intent to make up for last year's absence of good storrowings over Labor Day weekend. James Sappenfield spotted a spectacularly storrowed truck on Soldiers Field Road inbound by the Harvard Business School around noon.
A rental-truck driver brought Storrow Drive inbound to a halt around 4 p.m. with another storrowing that left his truck looking like an occult hand had had some fun with a giant can opener.
Kevin got a couple of good shots:
Waka shows us the wobbly bits:
Recently:
Last year's Allston Christmas storrowing drought now only a bad memory.
What the duck? Amphibious tourist craft storrows.
Looks like the Storrow Pool is closed before it even opened.
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Comments
Things happen in threes...
...and the day is not over yet...
Now that's impressive! That
Now that's impressive! That is some quality storrowing right there!
BRAVO!
A complete canopener!
They should get the sardine award for mastery.
Second truck
I went by it at 4:30-4:45 and there was no hold up there as it was pulled into the side, but I can see it might have created a problem a bit earlier.
How hard would it be
for all the rental truck chains and franchises and what-have-you to simply put something in their computer that will generate an alert whenever someone rents a truck to go to Boston? It could be like a black box warning, right there on the screen, on the contract, warning "STAY OFF" Storrow and the rest of the river roads. This cannot be cheap for them -- they lose a truck out of service at the busiest time of year. We got the lecture twice from the rental place when I was moving out of Allston after college years ago.
It's the truck manufacturers' fault
for making trucks that are too big for Boston's third world roads, not Boston's fault for having roads not up to the standards of the rest of the country.
If only people packed their belongings onto the handlebars of a bicycle and peddled their way to university, we wouldn't have these constant pesky insinuations that the Athens of America isn't quite the City on a Hill that it likes to think of itself as.
Also, truck manufacturers are for-profit corporations and thus evil, while Boston and Massachusetts are left-leaning governments and automatically good.
There! By my psychic powers of precognition, I've summarized the contents of the rest of this thread. Nothing more to see.
Missed one
47 comments about how this is Boston's fault because the signage doesn't conform to some obscure Federal DOT standard.
If you truly believe that DOT signing standards are obscure
and don't need to be followed, then I'll be happy to propose an ordinance in your town that will change all the Stop signs to read "You Shouldn't Pass Here Blindly", change the colors of the signs to white on green and change the shape to a pentagon, and relocate them so they are not visible until AFTER drivers have entered the intersection.
You missed the joke
Anyway, the same thing is said every time a truck hits a bridge on a river road. You say the signage isn't conforming to a standard. Someone else says you might be correct but it's unlikely that's the reason they hit the bridge.
I'm all in favor of changing the signs to meet the standard, BTW. I just don't think it will cut down on the number of collisions.
Why is it
The entrances from the greenway to central artery (I-93) have a curtain of big metal chains hanging such that they'd make a loud noise and maybe damage a truck which was oversized.
Google Streetview Link showing the chains
Why is the same system not employed for the river roads?
ALSO, the on-ramps to I-93 have a system which will trigger a red light if an over height truck attempts to enter. Why isn't that on the the river road too?
Also
I have heard of rubber "flaps" that hit the truck loudly if it is too tall.
Simple. Because the river roads are under the control of the
DCR instead of MassDOT. And, as I've pointed out numerous times before in threads about Storrowings, the DCR, and before them, the MDC, has refused to install proper signing and warning systems. Andy why? Because the people running the DCR/MDC have limited experience in actual traffic engineering, have very little, if any, grasp of the realities here, and continue to live in an alternate bizarro fantasy universe where people somehow use Storrow and Memorial Drives only for "recreational travel", and not to commute to and from work or the other 10,000 reasons one may need to drive on those roads. Not to mention the fact that, whenever ANY improvements - however simple or are proposed for these roadways, the usual gaggle of self-righteous "environmentalists" all come out of the woodwork and convince the political leaders that any attempt to actually solve the problem will result in the end of the world (or at least dogs and cats living together).
But let's continue to always blame the drivers for an issue that has been going on nearly forever, and actually seems to be getting worse. Classic Boston (and Massachusetts) "head in the sand, how dare do we do anything to solve a problem" attitude.
Run for office
I'll vote for you even if you're a secret/overt/out and proud communist/alien pod person/cyclist.
Please cite your sources
You assume that your interpretation of proper signage will fix the problem.
Please supply evidence that "proper" signage does diddly squat. As in studies or before-after scenarios.
Regulations and standards do not always translate into effective interventions.
Another one for the back pocket
What that means
"Do not always" is not the same as "never", or, even "rarely".
It means that research is necessary, as is proper design, not just "ideas" of how the world should be - like your insistence that everything be paved over because cars are people. This is a lesson that you need to learn far more than Roadman.
So put THAT in your back pocket, because I know that you will fail to understand what the previous statement even means, given your fundamental lack of understanding of anything not black/white dichotomized.
From the queen of nuance herself
Broad generalizations, , nativist rage, and the occasional death threat.
Color me re-educated in the fine art of rhetoric and subtlety.
The CT turnpike seems to do a
The CT turnpike seems to do a great job as stopping trucks, even has audio warning systems.
When a problem keeps happening,the source of the problem is the road.
Turnpike?
The Connecticut Turnpike is I-395 and I-95, an interstate that has to have bridge heights to interstate standards. Of course there are few problems.
That's like saying that Interstate 93 "does a pretty good job" with tall vehicles. In other words, a inaccurate comparison.
The problem isn't the road - the problem is drivers who think they can take any vehicle on any road and that they don't have to read any signs or notice a rubber WHUMP on their windshield when they do!
Nobody seems to notice the
Nobody seems to notice the truck was empty. Why would you take an empty truck into the city?
To pick up and take stuff out
To pick up and take stuff out of the city?
Recreational bridge-bashing
.