Big Dig Tunnel--

Aren't there dangling chains or something that you're supposed to hit long before you get into the tunnel? (in addition to a break-beam and a directed bell?) What pre-warning is there?

The operator and company SHOULD get into ALL kinds of civil, criminal, and financial trouble for this, but as the public, wouldn't we prefer to have a tripwire / exploding dye pack / surface-to-surface missiles to stop this guy long before he gets into the expensive and dangerous tunnel?
 
This is negligence on the part of the carrier plain and simple. You need to know the load you're carrying - it's height for example - and be cognizant of the road you're traveling on. A lot of trucking companies use mapping software (pc miler for example) that will tell them things like over passes, or tunnels on the road they're traveling and the clearance heights on them. That way a driver and know they need to go a different route if there is say an overpass they know they will not fit under due to the load they're carrying.
 
The truck was from Ontario, the driver was from Ontario, and the load was a piece of filtration equipment (the video shows the container was pushed back on the flatbed by the impact) from Ontario. No structural damage to the tunnel.
 
stellarfun said:
The truck was from Ontario, the driver was from Ontario, and the load was a piece of filtration equipment (the video shows the container was pushed back on the flatbed by the impact) from Ontario. No structural damage to the tunnel.
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Once again.
The metric system is to blame.
When will those 275 other countries learn?
 
SeamusMcFly said:
Once again.
The metric system is to blame.
When will those 275 other countries learn?
Click to expand...

No. The driver is to blame here. This wasn't an inevitable event. Canadian drivers are in the US all the time. If the driver was confused by the imperial form of measurement, they should have taken the time to figure it out.

Also remember that the metric system only made its way to Canada in the 1970s.
 
If it's anything bigger than the most rinky-dink of intermodal trucking companies, then these days they're all required to obey the GPS and run on their designated routes...with an electronic paper trail on the manifest showing exactly what route they took. No creative shortcutting allowed. That'll get them written up by their OWN dispatcher. A blind squirrel could make that run because virtually all decision-making on the route has been taken out of the driver's hands compared to truckers' past.

This clown probably thought he was being clever. In addition to all the damages the carrier is going to get from MassDOT, they're going to have to reimburse the container's owner for loss of the shipping vessel. When Beacon Park was still open every idiot coming out of the yard who Storrowed himself instead of taking the Pike would get shit from the state, from his own employer over the liability, and from CSX who'd fine the truck company into oblivion (and ban repeat offenders from the yard) for damaging one of theirs or their shippers' IM cubes. It's merely the truck company's own trailer that gets trashed when you Storrow a regular old tractor-trailer. But doing that with a cube piggyback is doubleplusbad because it's someone else's property that gets destroyed.

Really...it takes a special kind of stupid to pull this off in spite of the ten miles' long list of reasons you're guaranteed to lose your job over it and how much the big companies drill "Don't be stupid" into their drivers' heads.
 
As explained it was planned from the start. They didnt decide later to build on that part of the tunnel it was built to support future buildings from day 1, so its strong enough. So no no problem at all. If they try to jerry rig a building onto a part of the tunnel that was never intended to be built on then this question may be able to be asked.
 
I'm sure we'll find out whether the company was directing the driver properly to avoid the tunnel or whether he was just following his directions. As far as civil damages are concerned.

But when I first saw this video (I rewatched before making my 'criminalize it' comment) I thought that the back end of the trailer was another car, and that he just crushed someone. And while that was not the case here, that absolutely could have happened in a different situation, with someone dying.

And thats obviously not the worst case scenario, which would be some load damaging the tunnel enough to cause a lot more death than whomever is unfortunate enough to be right behind the negligent driver.

This has got to be reckless driving on the driver's part, at a minimum. He's the one in the truck, and he's the one that decided to ignore the signs. Even if his employer had a GPS system that was telling him to drive through the tunnel (which I think is unlikely, nobody running a trucking company would want a system like that), he's the one that made the decision, and if his company would have punished him for following the law and not going through the tunnel, he'd have legal recourse against them.
 
DominusNovus said:
I'm sure we'll find out whether the company was directing the driver properly to avoid the tunnel or whether he was just following his directions. As far as civil damages are concerned.

But when I first saw this video (I rewatched before making my 'criminalize it' comment) I thought that the back end of the trailer was another car, and that he just crushed someone. And while that was not the case here, that absolutely could have happened in a different situation, with someone dying.

And thats obviously not the worst case scenario, which would be some load damaging the tunnel enough to cause a lot more death than whomever is unfortunate enough to be right behind the negligent driver.

This has got to be reckless driving on the driver's part, at a minimum. He's the one in the truck, and he's the one that decided to ignore the signs. Even if his employer had a GPS system that was telling him to drive through the tunnel (which I think is unlikely, nobody running a trucking company would want a system like that), he's the one that made the decision, and if his company would have punished him for following the law and not going through the tunnel, he'd have legal recourse against them.
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Truck company GPS'es have all FHA clearance data pre-fed into their systems. If it's any state or provincial highway of any kind in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and NAFTA neighbors Canada & Mexico...it's already in there by default. As are most town-control thoroughfares and designated truck routes. About the only gray area that may not have clearance data are secondary municipal streets, which if data is lacking and there is a clearance restriction lurking in the weeds...is only unaccounted for because truck volumes are way too low to have been inputed in the first place. Just feed in the height of the piggyback load from the manifest, and the mapping software will instantly auto-filter out any/all routes that can't take the dimension. It's almost literally impossible to run into trouble by following the GPS to the letter.

Not following the onboard GPS is the only way this incident can happen. Or following one's own iPhone GPS instead of the carrier's because the driver thinks he/she's outsmarting the system.



FWIW...this shit doesn't just happen in the CA/T. Sumner and Callahan get stopped all the freaking time because of numbnuts truck drivers who blow the clearance restriction.

https://www.wcvb.com/article/sumner-tunnel-closed-for-over-height-truck/14406542

https://www.wcvb.com/article/video-shows-over-height-truck-squeezing-through-callahan-tunnel/8110735

https://patch.com/massachusetts/boston/sumner-tunnel-blocked-truck-thats-too-big

https://www.wcvb.com/article/sumner-tunnel-closed-for-over-height-truck/14406542
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Truck company GPS'es have all FHA clearance data pre-fed into their systems. If it's any state or provincial highway of any kind in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and NAFTA neighbors Canada & Mexico...it's already in there by default. As are most town-control thoroughfares and designated truck routes. About the only gray area that may not have clearance data are secondary municipal streets, which if data is lacking and there is a clearance restriction lurking in the weeds...is only unaccounted for because truck volumes are way too low to have been inputed. Just feed in the height of the piggyback load from the manifest, and the mapping software will instantly auto-filter out any/all routes that can't take the dimension. It's almost literally impossible to run into trouble by following the GPS to the letter.

Not following the onboard GPS is the only way this incident can happen. Or following one's own iPhone GPS instead of the carrier's because the driver thinks he/she's outsmarting the system.



FWIW...this shit doesn't just happen in the CA/T. Sumner and Callahan get stopped all the freaking time because of numbnuts truck drivers who blow the clearance restriction.

https://www.wcvb.com/article/sumner-tunnel-closed-for-over-height-truck/14406542

https://www.wcvb.com/article/video-shows-over-height-truck-squeezing-through-callahan-tunnel/8110735

https://patch.com/massachusetts/boston/sumner-tunnel-blocked-truck-thats-too-big

https://www.wcvb.com/article/sumner-tunnel-closed-for-over-height-truck/14406542
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I figured as much, but I wanted to cover the other possibility. Given how often this happens, we need to be less forgiving to those that do this.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
This clown probably thought he was being clever. In addition to all the damages the carrier is going to get from MassDOT, they're going to have to reimburse the container's owner for loss of the shipping vessel. When Beacon Park was still open every idiot coming out of the yard who Storrowed himself instead of taking the Pike would get shit from the state, from his own employer over the liability, and from CSX who'd fine the truck company into oblivion (and ban repeat offenders from the yard) for damaging one of theirs or their shippers' IM cubes. It's merely the truck company's own trailer that gets trashed when you Storrow a regular old tractor-trailer. But doing that with a cube piggyback is doubleplusbad because it's someone else's property that gets destroyed.
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This was an extreme case, but what is the mechanism to recoup these costs? For example when a truck runs down a traffic signal it's just 'oops sorry' and the City pays to replace it.
 
sm89 said:
This was an extreme case, but what is the mechanism to recoup these costs? For example when a truck runs down a traffic signal it's just 'oops sorry' and the City pays to replace it.
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Probably just a fine for illegal vehicle when it's a bridge strike. Combination plates (and others) are prohibited on the parkways to begin with, so Storrowings get their damage and Police OT costs reimbursed by traffic tickets. Including tix for everyone driving a non-overheight truck of prohibited plate class on the parkway.

CA/T, Sumner, Callahan, etc. are a different ballgame entirely because of the extra MassDOT oversight for the tunnel crossings. As well as fact that Southie Haul Road, the Ted (which has interstate-regulation default clearances Sumner/Callahan do not have), and Surface Rd. were explicitly created as bypasses. There might be damage bills. There almost certainly are going to be heftier fines.



As far as the driver goes...he lost his job the second he disobeyed dispatcher's routing and destroyed somebody else's cube payload. The state fines are merely a footnote after the fact. On sheer biz-to-biz grounds he's already made himself too toxic to be entrusted with anyone's deliveries.
 
From what I read somewhere, the driver was claiming to have made the same run with the same type of load multiple times. Perhaps this load was a little taller for some reason, but he assumed it was the same and went on his merry way thinking he knew the usual route was the correct route.
 
My understanding is that repaving can gradually reduce vertical clearance, but I have no idea whether the Tip O'Neil Tunnel has been paved recently relative to his last trip.

The suspension on the truck or trailer might have been a little bit higher than what he was previously used to, or maybe he might have had a different trailer with a slightly different deck.

When I was watching a bunch of Youtube trucking videos a few years ago, it seemed to be the case that when crossing state lines, truckers generally didn't go through weigh stations at all unless staff happened to be present (which often wasn't the case). I'm wondering if automated equipment to check height and weight at the state borders along major highways that could operate without any state employees present to sanity check whether an oversize permit is required and requiring all drivers of large commercial trucks to go through those weigh stations might help to prevent this sort of thing.
 
I don't know what exactly weigh station ops currently are like, but more automation of weigh stations sounds pretty brilliant. Even if it all it does is halve the staffing requirement, it would mean they could staff the stations twice as often.

But of course, if it is such a brilliant idea, surely someone has thought of it or there must be more to it right now?
 
Electronic height detectors are tried-and-true technology. And warning telltales (those chains/flaps hung from a sign mast like on Storrow) have literally been around since the Roman Empire. Problem is you can smack the top of a truck with chains multiple times and flash warning signals at them for miles on end, and it doesn't matter. If the driver wasn't paying attention to the illegal route in the first place, they're in all likelihood not going to be paying any attention to active warning signs. Not paying attention is the common denominator for every Storrowing. Those parkway flaps make quite a racket smacking on the roof...but literally every truck that has ever Storrowed itself has been smacked good by the flaps to no avail.


I would imagine pavement-embedded scales are way too maintenance-intensive for most DOT's, especially with the freeze-thaw climate we've got here. Even the weigh-in-motion ones that don't require stopping outright on a scale surface require complicated sets of induction loops in the pavement. The faster the truck goes, the more loops it takes to get a measurement and the more spread out they have to be by pavement area. AFAIK there isn't a "Jetsons shit" scale yet that you can get an instantaneous or half-virtualized visual snapshot as if it were some sort of traffic cam for weights. Something on the roadway surface...be it an induction scale or a portable setup wheeled in those rare times a weigh station is open...still has to come in full physical contact with the weight-on-axle. So it's going to take a pounding and need to be regularly replaced when the freeze-thaw cycle inevitably chews up the surface.

There is a transponder system in voluntary use where a detector on the road pings a transponder on the truck for a unique ID, and then auto-downloads the truck's manifest and logs the officially-recorded weight. It's basically like EZ-Pass for trucks, and part of that same Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) automation that's taking over the industry with things like the dispatcher GPS-designated routes. Of course, a fibbed manifest can lie about the weight. But since there's a 'ping' trail any habitual offenders are eventually going to get caught. They're definitely screwed if a weigh station is open and State Police turn up a discrepancy between actual weight and 'pinged' weight.


There is a reason why weigh stations never have scheduled openings, only surprise inspections. Part of stopping the trucks is to spot-check hours-of-work regs and nail the truck companies who work their drivers illegal hours. They check vehicle inspections (trailers, because they're swapped around often, can get out-of-sync with vehicle inspections). They check the logbooks. And...yeah...they check for drugs sometimes too, I-95 being America's narcotic superhighway and all.
 
Why do tunnels leave the daylight bright lights at their entrance on at all hours of the day?

I thought the purpose of the bright lights overhead at tunnel entrances was to allow your eyes to adapt from daylight to tunnel lighting. On sunny days the overlit tunnel ease you downfrom full sun to dim tunnel


But at night, the booster lights hurt rather than help the transition when they remain on: you go from the darkness of i-93 on the North or South approaches, to a thousand feet of overlit tunnel that hurts your eyes. Worse it is a total waste of electricity.

What's the deal?

Seems to me at night there should be street lights shining on the tunnel's outdoor approaches that ease you *up* to the tunnels lighting.

It also seems an extremely simple technological fix to have a light sensor just like every common Street light does to detect when it gets dark-- or even three of them that have to agree with each other if you want a more robust system
 
They're supposed to turn the daylight transition lights to half-power at dusk, and for years they did exactly that by turning off every other fixture. I guess for whatever reason the timers aren't enabled anymore and it's always-on. I haven't driven 93 or the Ted at night in eons so I can't confirm which portals might be doing it wrong today.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
They're supposed to turn the daylight transition lights to half-power at dusk, and for years they did exactly that by turning off every other fixture. I guess for whatever reason the timers aren't enabled anymore and it's always-on. I haven't driven 93 or the Ted at night in eons so I can't confirm which portals might be doing it wrong today.
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Wouldn't photo cells (like we use in every building) be the smart solution here? Only on when needed, and dimmed as appropriate based on light levels.
 
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