Thursday, March 1, 2012

Low clearance

its snowing a bit again, so another pic with some snow in it..
this is memorial drive, a road that runs along the charles river. according to google maps, its called memorial drive on the cambridge side, and storrow drive on the boston side (as you can see here), and as you can see above, its only for cars. trucks, buses, anything not a car is not allowed on it. i dont really like this road, its often crowded and everyone drives so fast and masshole style (but you do get a great view of boston)! besides, especially the first few times the signs that you can see above really freaked me out. we have a real big american pickup truck, and every time i was afraid we were not really allowed on this road, and surely would hit this "cars only" sign. if not, then we would get stuck under the low bridge (for which the sign is actually warning..). because thats what this sign is for; trucks and buses do not fit under the bridge and will get stuck. ofcourse, we never got stuck... but every now and then, despite the many, many warning signs, a truck enters this road and gets stuck. as you can imagine, this generates a mess and long traffic jams. we were once watching a free movie at the hatch shell, right next to storrow drive, and suddenly there was this awful, loud shrieking noise... yep, a truck that barely made it, perhaps shaved off a bit of the bridge while just driving on with great speed. on september 1st, when all the new students move into town, often rented moving trucks get stuck, as people tend to forget they are driving something huge..
but the most funny incident i just read on wikipedia... once... a truck got stuck transporting.... scissors! they got spilled all over the road and 30 cars ended up with flat tires. detailed as wikipedia is, 2 cars even got 4 flat tires. the road was closed for hours....