Another truck hits Young St. Bridge

Tonawanda Mayor William Strassbourg says there's a project right now that's in the works. "That's still waiting for approval before we can go out for design, but it has lasers, and it ends up bouncing the laser beam off over height trucks that will then activate more lights to try to alert the drivers, even beyond what's already being done to stop these collisions from happening," says Strassbourg. "It's just bogged down right now, waiting for all final approvals before we can go out for the actual design and then to implement the system. So it's still in the hopper. It's still working its way through all the approvals, but that is the plan to have that done."

Strassbourg says there is a long history of trucks hitting the bridge, and that's where he feels the responsibility lies. "There's seven or eight signs with flags that I mean you just have to blatantly ignore the height limits of that bridge to drive through and hit it. Now we've done so much with the signs, and I mean, ultimately, it does lie completely with the driver of these trucks that keep running into the bridge," says Strassbourg.

Strassbourg says he's not sure if new state rules issuing points against commercial drivers licenses against those who hit a bridge will be a deterrent. He also suspects which GPS may lead to these strikes as well. "One of the things we've heard in the past is that these truck drivers have been using normal GPS instead of commercial GPS, because commercial GPS is more expensive and that that's how they end up on these routes, because they're not using the right GPS system. So hopefully, implementing something like this incentivizes them to get the proper tools to assist them, so we can eliminate this as a problem," explains Strassbourg.

He says blocking the area near the bridge off from trucks is off the table. "There are commercial businesses. so you have to allow them a way to get to those businesses. If you ban it, you would shut businesses down. It's just a choke point of where that bridge was, you know, it was built in 1919, and at the time, they didn't need to have it higher, with the way trucks are today. So we really can't do that as an option only because we would be shutting down businesses in that corridor," says Strassbourg.