Capacity
Around the same time that the bridge was freed from toll, heavier vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine were making their way onto the roads. The slender cast iron span of Cleveland Bridge required reinforcement. Major steelwork was inserted under the roadway around 1929, giving it the strength which today allows it to carry 38 tonne trucks. Bath has no eastern bypass, so the bridge has become a heavily used "Euro route" for large trucks on their way from Britain's south coast ports to the docks further north. High volumes of local traffic at peak travelling times make this a regular traffic slow spot in the mornings and evenings. All told, over 17,000 vehicles use the bridge each day between 7am and 7pm. Inevitably, accidental strikes to the bridge occur every few months as heavy trucks misjudge the narrow roadway or try to pass each other.
Read more about this topic: Cleveland Bridge
Famous quotes containing the word capacity:
“Taste is nothing but an enlarged capacity for receiving pleasure from works of imagination.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“That way of life against which my generation rebelled had given us grim courage, fortitude, self-discipline, a sense of individual responsibility, and a capacity for relentless hard work.”
—Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968)
“What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)