Trucks keep hitting bridges.
We keep the record.

From 2021 through 2022 there were a combined 808 reported bridge strikes across New York State — incidents the State calls “100 percent preventable.” NYSDOT responded with the “Check Your Height, Know It’s Right” enforcement and awareness campaign.

The Thruway Authority logged 91 bridge strikes through November 5, 2023 — a 44% jump over the 63 recorded in all of 2022.

Illinois DOT puts the average repair cost of an oversize-load bridge strike at roughly $400,000; the Illinois Trucking Association says $100,000 towing bills are “particularly common in the Chicagoland area.”

Houston TranStar counted the Houston Avenue Bridge over I-10 — the lowest on that stretch at 14'3" — as struck 77 times since the start of 2025 (four more in the first weeks of 2026). Drivers routinely ignore designated over-height routes.

The Thruway Authority identifies the North Grand Island Bridge as the second most-hit structure on the entire NYS Thruway system — 23 strikes since 2020, eight of them in 2024.

Bridge strikes read as comedy online; the bill lands on the bridge owner. After rebuilding its Gossett Drive span in September 2020, the short-line Greenville & Western Railway absorbed seven vehicular impacts in two years and more than $150,000 in repairs — "a nearly unbearable cost for a small company, especially when insurance companies often fight long and hard (sometimes for years) to avoid paying claims." The railroad also rejects the joke framing on safety grounds: "A damaged railroad bridge could result in a fatality to our train crew if that damage shifts the bridge on its footings." Its message to drivers: "TAKE THE TIME TO KNOW YOUR VEHICLE AND KNOW YOUR ROUTE… Gossett Drive is a 9′-0″ clearance. The clearance will not be higher tomorrow."

Kansas City Terminal Railway’s safety director, Shawn Lauby, told KSHB the company "has spent nearly $100,000 in the past 10 years on warning sign upgrades and repairing damage from crashes" at the 1912 Independence Avenue bridge. "In response to many of these collisions, we have to send out emergency structural engineers to evaluate the structural integrity of the bridge," he said. "It is frustrating. It’s a drain on our resources… It’s a problem for the motoring public having the street clogged up every time this happens." The city has gone further than usual — two clearance-warning signs per direction about 300 feet apart, a railroad-installed flashing 12.0′ sign on the bridge itself, and it reported the low clearance to GPS companies hoping they would route trucks around it. It is the same arithmetic as the Greenville & Western’s $150,000 in South Carolina: the bridge owner pays.

Chicago has roughly 1,750 viaducts, many built in the late 1800s, and truck strikes are so routine that the Chicago Police Department 'gave up counting' vertical-clearance accidents — often not even ticketing because, as a CPD spokeswoman put it, the truck 'is already crunched like a sardine can with its top peeled off.' CDOT's program to raise the most-hit viaducts runs about $1.5 million each. (Reported by Heavy Duty Trucking, early 2000s.)