French Tour Bus Clearance Accident

[Brian556]

The picture is worth looking at. Busses don't do this too often.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/34-injured-when-low-french-bridge-shears-top-tour-bus-n399221

[SSOWorld]

Moral of the story... Never - EVER - trust a GPS.

[noelbotevera]

Moral of the story... Never - EVER - trust a GPS.

Also never trust phones to give directions. There'sa reason why I want to buy those Rand McN's maps in Staples.

[CNGL-Leudimin]

There is a fail in this thread's title. The accident was in France, but the bus was Spanish.

[PHLBOS]

Unfortunately, this is not the first time a bus had an incursion with a low-clearance structure due to the driver blindly going by a (standard-off-the-shelf) GPS device.

Several years back in Boston (MA), a 12-foot-high bus carrying 40 passengers (many of them high school students) got on a road (Soldiers Field road) that had overheight vehicle prohibition signs at every entrance ramp.  Shortly after getting on, the bus hit an overpass that only had a 10-foot-high clearance.

As a result of that crash, there were several injuries (including a then-16-year-old that's still in a quadriplegic state to this day); and the Philadelphia-based bus company ultimately went out of business and was sued.

Unlike delivery trucks/moving vans (there seems to be one that get stuck on a NYC-area parkway at least once-a-week) that carry a maximum of 3 people (1 driver + 2 passengers); a bus' primary cargo is passengers.  One would think that bus drivers would pay better attention to the signs and actual conditions than their truck-driving counterparts.  Apparently (& sadly) not.

The fact that this recent incident happened in another country all but proves that this is not just a US or North American problem.

There is a fail in this thread's title. The accident was in France, but the bus was Spanish.

Per the OP's article, the bus was traveling from Spain (en route to the Netherlands) at the time of the crash.

[Duke87]

Unlike delivery trucks/moving vans (there seems to be one that get stuck on a NYC-area parkway at least once-a-week) that carry a maximum of 3 people (1 driver + 2 passengers); a bus' primary cargo is passengers.  One would think that bus drivers would pay better attention to the signs and actual conditions than their truck-driving counterparts.  Apparently (& sadly) not.

It happens more often with trucks because trucks go all sorts of places and the driver will likely not be familiar with many of his destinations. Buses typically operate along fixed routes, and thus will never encounter any permanent features unexpectedly. The exception is charter buses, which both this and the Boston example were.

It's also not an entirely new phenomenon. Even before the days of GPS, you'd get people renting trucks and not paying attention to low clearance signs since they're used to ignoring them. You'd even get professional truckers getting on parkways, thinking that they were only risking getting a ticket for ignoring the no trucks sign and not realizing that the road is physically impassible to them.

Particularly when the road they were supposed to be on got messed up. I remember one day years ago when I-95 in Westchester County was suffering from a horrendous traffic jam due to an accident. We encountered *two* trucks stuck on the Hutch.