1/31/18 LIVE CHAT Follow Up: Avoiding Overpass Crashes

10 comments

1. When traveling in Canada it is best to know your height in meters.

   Reply

   1. Thanks Paul! Although we didn’t mention that here during the follow up chat, we did include it in the original video. Thanks for mentioning it here, too, since it’s so important.

      Reply

2. Watch for low hanging wires. Recently our power company replaced a power pole in our neighborhood while we were gone. The cable TV wire that was attached to the pole was reattached at a lower height. The old position was lower then I’d liked but if I drove under the wire slowly at an angle we had no problem. To our surprise when we returned from a RV trip the cable, which I still thought was okay, bounced across our roof. No damage thankfully. After several calls to our cable company and waiting over 6 weeks the cable was raised. The position, after the pole was replaced, was 12.5 ft and should have been at 14.5 ft according to the cable techs. They got it to 13+ ft. So the advice is watch for low hanging cables, they can be hard to spot and I’ve never seen one marked. They can rip AC units and/or satellite dishes off your roof.

   Reply

   1. Good advice, Iggy! Must’ve been quite a surprise to try and drive under cables you’d successfully passed under countless times before… and have them scrape! As always, nothing beats being vigilant and paying careful attention… but you can’t catch EVERYTHING! Glad you got the cable company to raise that line up for you!

      Reply

3. What a Great and informative video!! Love all your videos, I’ve seen them all, and am always telling other RVers about you guys. Learned a lot from you but mostly to not be afraid to tackle any repair job on my rig. I have a travel trailer which we just bought at 31 feet so I’m learning to handle it on streets and highways. Thanks again for the advice in this video, learned a lot

   Reply

   1. Thanks so much for your nice comments, Vic! And congrats on your new RV! :)

      Reply

4. Hi Peter and John! I LOVE your videos. I have learned a ton from watching them over the years. Thank you. I am watching your live chat video about overpass crashes. I notice you said you don’t use either a GPS or the Rand McNally Motor carriers atlas. Well then, how the heck DO you plan your routes?

   Thanks,

   Ian Schneiderman

   Reply

   1. Hi Ian! Thank you so much for your very kind comments, and great question! So…. this requires a bit of a long-winded explanation, since it’s fair to assume that having been full-time for all these years, we’d have lots of standard planning tools in place for routing. First off, RV GPS didn’t exist when we hit the road in ’03, so by the time it came out, we were already used to navigating without it. And the fact that we’ve never heard of a single unit that gets rave reviews that we felt we could absolutely trust, we just never bought one. We have a plain old Tom Tom that has no settings for height or weight.

      Another thing for us was that we lived all our lives on the East Coast, and one of the factors that led us to start RVing was having discovered the incredible dramatic natural beauty of the West. So it was a natural thing for us to spend the vast majority of our time west of the Rockies once we hit the road, and there are a lot fewer low overpasses out here compared to the NE. The rare times we RV East, we’re usually not heading into remote areas seeking natural beauty (because, frankly, once you’ve been in the Rockies, Cascades, Sierras, etc, the Poconos and Blue Ridge Mountains, while nice, pale in comparison). We’ve been in 49 of the 50 States, but we’re definitely spoiled by the West. So now when we go East, we’re mostly visiting family, and generally stay on more major roads to reach them, and know the areas we’re headed into.

      One other factor is our travel style… we sometimes don’t know exactly where we’re going when we get up in the morning. Rather than sit down to map out a route, we head in a direction, and take whatever route seems interesting.

      One last factor is my (Peter) experience. Having taught probably 700+ motor coach operators during nearly 10 years running a large training program, and having won a shelf full of trophies competing in bus driving competitions (yes, such a thing exists!). So I have an unfair advantage. Not that I’m looking to be stuck nosed up to an 11′ overpass on a winding country road or anything, but I lack any real fear about how I would extricate myself. But the reason it’s never happened is partly due to my deeply-engrained observational habits. Not that there’s no such thing as an overpass without advance warning signs…. but if they ARE there, I’m not likely to miss ’em. ;-)

      Long story short(er)…. to a very large extent, we wing it, because we want to explore remote scenic areas, and are okay depending purely on our observational and driving skills to manage it. It’s definitely not something I recommend for everyone, so any additional tools are a good idea…. the best-rated RV GPS you can find, a motor carriers atlas, an app or two, and some planning using Google Street View are all worthwhile parts of the safety arsenal for most RVers.

      Reply

5. In Australia, someone has very kindly set up a page of low bridge POIs – http://www.poidb.com/groups/view-poi.asp?groupid=527&r=&f=&searchfor=&ll=&loc=&region=2_0&page=1. I have made a list of those low bridges that are in the areas I’m likely to be travelling so i can be aware of them when trip planning. If there is nothing similar in other places, then maybe someone can set up something like this.

   Reply

   1. What a great idea, Chris! When we drove a campervan from Port Douglas to Sydney a couple of years ago, we obviously didn’t even think about height, since we didn’t have anything to worry about in our little van. But it sure would be a big deal in a bigger rig.

      Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.