Old Gate Lane Bridge (Milford)

The Connecticut Crash Data Repository records about 1,700 crashes since 2015 whose first damage- or injury-producing event was a collision with a bridge's overhead structure — an average of more than 150 a year. Four were fatal, and in every one of those four the person who died was the driver of the vehicle that hit the bridge. The state has hundreds of bridges under 14 ft 6 in, most of them carrying railroads that predate the trucks passing beneath: "the train infrastructure was built in Connecticut long before some of the roadway infrastructure," says Eric Jackson of the Connecticut Transportation Institute. "That was back before we had trucks that were 13 feet tall. So those bridge overpasses were built for, maybe, horse and buggy." This is one of the few states where a public crash database can be counted at all — which is exactly what the national picture lacks.

Vehicles over eight feet tall are generally barred from the Merritt, Wilbur Cross and Milford parkways, whose overpasses date to the 1930s — and officials have long complained that they end up on them anyway. In 2023 the General Assembly raised the base fine for driving a commercial vehicle on a state parkway from $50 to $500. Whether it changed anything is unknown: the state's public-safety department did not respond to the newspaper's request for recent citation data. Set against the enforcement ladder elsewhere in this record — Melbourne's $169 careless-driving ticket, Milford's $2,200 — it is another attempt to price a behaviour that keeps producing six-figure repair bills.