Manchester Bus crash

Seeing quite a few people asking why the driver didn't and/or saying the driver should have stopped immediately when they heard the impact with the bridge and prevented this happening... scary how many people don't seem to understand that even under emergency braking a bus is going to continue for another 18+ metres (at a minimum) even at those speeds... (some of those people drive as well...). (And you absolutely can't convince these people otherwise).

I swear sometimes I've woken up in another reality somewhere around COVID.
 
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Resident said:
I've got my money on he didn't know the route but management told him to do it and just follow the route guide (printed on paper). He's turned one junction too early and was looking at the guide not the road and hit the bridge. The sad part about that is if that's the case, management will deny all knowledge of doing so.
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wait. buses don't have any kind of gps navigation built in? like even a mobile phone can do it and give audio cues

you'd think minimum buses would have like routes programmed in to them which you can select.

we still trapped in the 90s? you'd think buses would even have some kind of height sensor in them... what would it cost like £5

Health and safety gone mad, but in all the wrong places... it seems...
 
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arknor said:
wait. buses don't have any kind of gps navigation built in? like even a mobile phone can do it and give audio cues

you'd think minimum buses would have like routes programmed in to them which you can select.

we still trapped in the 90s? you'd think buses would even have some kind of height sensor in them... what would it cost like £5

Health and safety gone mad, but in all the wrong places... it seems...
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No, buses do not generally come with GPS. Neither do most vans, 7.5ters used for multi drop etc. In fact when I was out in a brand new Iveco 7.5t in 2018 it didn't even have central locking. "More stuff to go wrong" I was told.
 
Lopéz said:
No, buses do not generally come with GPS. Neither do most vans, 7.5ters used for multi drop etc. In fact when I was out in a brand new Iveco 7.5t in 2018 it didn't even have central locking. "More stuff to go wrong" I was told.
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Isn't a lot of the Bee network BYD electric buses you'd think they would have some modern tech.
 
High vehicles hitting that bridge happen every now and then, but the bus does look to be going quire fast considering the road is only short before where it hit. You would assume the brakes would have been applied after hitting the wooden beam which hangs down before the bridge.
 
throwaway4372 said:
of all the times they put driving aid tech in cars and I absolutely hate it, this is one example where it could be quite good.
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you'd think they'd have minimum GPS and acceleration sensors just for tracking metrics and driver standards.

but I guess the drivers would be against it, probably a union somewhere holding us back to the 1980s, outraged that buses aren't operated by 2 people anymore.
 
Lonewolf said:
High vehicles hitting that bridge happen every now and then, but the bus does look to be going quire fast considering the road is only short before where it hit. You would assume the brakes would have been applied after hitting the wooden beam which hangs down before the bridge.
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Difficult to get exact speeds from the video with the short distances involved but I think the bus looks like it is going faster than it appears to actually have been - it was doing somewhere between 22 and 25MPH before hitting the bridge (looks like it was accelerating a bit so may have hit slightly higher than that) and averaged ~15MPH after hitting the bridge to leaving the video camera view (unless the camera frame rate has some issues though the on screen clock seems more or less correct with some slight variance).
 
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Don't take this too seriously as it is roughly worked out and some information might not be accurate - but looking at Google Maps it looks like the bit sticking down from the warning thing before the bridge has wrapped around the horizontal bar (maybe hit at speed) and is actually over 4.5m from the road level! (though doesn't mean it is still the case but the Street View imagery is fairly recent) so it is possible the bus driver used that as a gauge and as the bus cleared it assumed it was alright to proceed despite the height signs, the lowest point of the bridge also seems to be 3.31-3.35m rather than 3.5m though it is impossible to be fully accurate working off Google Maps info (and I'm only roughly approximating it though it should be fairly close).
 
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Resident said:
Having looked back on the Streetview. It appears the chains are missing on the side that the bus came from
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Yeah:

szx3t9p.jpeg


How it should be vs how it is in recent images.

So yeah driver has probably ignored the height signs, gone under that and cleared it and thought it was fine... doing some rough calculations there is more than 4.5m clearance with the chains not properly in place.

EDIT: Wonder if they were vandalised by empty headed **** heads or damaged by other high vehicles ignoring the height on the signs.
 
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Kenai said:
They're not damaged or missing as such, they've been looped round the main beam and so ended up too high
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One nearest the middle of the road looks to be damaged, the other is looped, be interesting to know if it was vandalism or from being hit by high vehicles. Shame they can't charge anyone who vandalised if so as well in this instance.

EDIT: Wonder if the bigger bar was intentionally removed for some reason.

EDIT2: As is often the case Reddit has a ton of information on this: https://www.salfordnow.co.uk/2023/0...s-rips-roof-clean-off-in-eccles-horror-crash/ previous instance in 2023 where it seems they've not repaired the barrier things since.
 
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I catch that particular bus a lot.. I tend to get it a few more stops down the route and there was quite a lot of people from my village on that bus.

There has been quite a few new drivers on the route, I don’t think they have regular route drivers, it always seems to be a different driver each time who doesn’t know the route. The last driver I had drove straight pass the bus stop that most of us wanted to get off at.

From my understanding the driver got lost and took the wrong route.

Edit: according to the neighbour hood fb group, another bus got stuck under that bridge not that long ago.
 
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slinxy said:
Edit: according to the neighbour hood fb group, another bus got stuck under that bridge not that long ago.
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From Googling it seems there was incidents there in April and December 2023 involving buses (roof hitting the bridge), the earlier one was pretty much a mirror incident of this current one aside from fortunately no one being injured. Also another incident involving a bus there in late 2024 but I can't find details on it - doesn't seem to be serious.

EDIT: Not just this bridge but there are 7 reports that I can find of double-decker buses hitting bridges in Manchester in recent years, 1 report of one losing its roof to hitting a tree and 1 report of 2 of them colliding. Sounds like there are some training issues which need addressing to me though I don't know how that stacks up to elsewhere for comparison.
 
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There were earlier ones. I was living in Eccles in the nineties and I remember one then.
One might have thought it might have stuck in the bus company's procedures that double decker buses do not fit under that aqueduct.
 
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