Every time a new technology becomes popular, effects happen that nobody anticipates—not the designers, not the firms selling the product, and not the users either. A small but significant case in point was highlighted in a recent Associated Press piece describing the increased vulnerability of historic covered bridges in the U. S. to truck and RV drivers who blindly follow their GPS instructions, only to smash into the bridge superstructure.
Covered bridges were themselves a technical innovation. According to the Wikipedia article on covered bridges, wooden structural members exposed to the weather, even if painted, will last only about 20 years before they need complete replacement. In the 19th century, the European innovation of covering a bridge with walls and a roof spread to the U. S., and many thousands of them were built, mostly between 1825 and 1875. Because they were usually built for local pedestrian, horse, and carriage traffic, the overhead clearance was typically about ten feet or less, well below the fourteen feet (4.3 meters) that is the U. S. interstate highway standard minimum clearance.
Although most of the covered bridges in the U. S. are long gone, some communities have preserved them for historic and cultural reasons, and a few dozen are still used for vehicular traffic. One such bridge stands outside Lyndon, Vermont. The 140-year-old Miller's Run bridge provides a shortcut around the town of Lyndon, and many GPS-enabled smartphone programs such as Waze intended for passenger cars will route drivers through the bridge. Despite several warning signs stating the low clearance of the bridge, at least 20 drivers of box trucks, vans, and RVs have hit the bridge in the last few years. Sometimes only minor cosmetic damage results, but on one occasion a delivery truck hit the bridge supports. That cost the town $100,000 and put the bridge out of commission for several months.
When the driver can be identified, the town can collect insurance money to pay for the damage, but many drivers just keep going, sometimes leaving air-conditioning units behind that are scraped off the top of campers.
Bill Caswell, who is president of the National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges, says this problem turns out to be a constant battle. The only sure-fire solution is to build heavy steel height-limit barriers at each end. But even when communities put up warning signs and flashing lights to inform drivers of the upcoming obstructions, many of them are still surprised when they hit the barriers.
Many of you may never have seen a covered bridge, and even fewer have tried to drive across one in a truck that's too tall for it. But this problem is a good example of a widespread issue that philosopher and psychologist Iain McGilchrist has pointed out in his book The Master and His Emissary, and more briefly in a recent article in the journal of religion and public life First Things.
McGilchrist is one of the world's leading experts in the differing functions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. His thesis defies easy summary, but basically, one can think of the two hemispheres as two people with complementary personalities working together as a team to accomplish mental tasks.
The right hemisphere is focused outward. It is the one that perceives the world and admits its complexity and mystery, in the sense of being partially but not completely understandable. The right hemisphere helps us to appreciate art, poetry, and the best in human relationships.
The left hemisphere, on the other hand, tends to simplify and abstract things down to only the essentials needed to get something done. It is the brain's bureaucrat, ignoring subtleties and ambiguities, and sticking heedlessly to a task long after the wider-ranging purposes of the task are forgotten. The left hemisphere can't see the forest for the trees, and McGilchrist's cri de coeur these days is that once more (after similar paths trod by ancient Greece and Rome), we are letting left-brain thinking take over our civilization, and are in danger of falling into ruin just as those civilizations did.
When someone driving a rented moving van for the first time tries to get through Lyndon, Vermont, if he or she is following right-brain thinking, the thing to do would be to drive through the quaint old town, stop in and have a meal, maybe, and stroll around the town common, appreciating the flavor of a historic location full of time-bound associations and resonances of the past.
But if the driver is dominated by left-brain patterns, Lyndon is just an obstruction on the way to wherever the goal lies, and in following that fount of efficiency, the voice on the GPS-enabled phone, the driver turns away from the town and heads straight for the Miller's Run bridge. Perhaps the driver observes the scenery—the trees, the street signs, the warning sign saying something about a bridge—but the left brain discards all of this as meaningless and useless fluff. The main thing is to cover so many miles in so many hours and get to the goal on the map. In this way, dozens of drivers have plowed straight into the bridge covering, wreaking various amounts of damage and propelling themselves off an idealized digital map into the real world of recalcitrant lumber, damaged vehicles, and auto insurance claims.
Perhaps the town of Lyndon will finally decide enough is enough, and erect two sturdy steel arch barriers over the roadways approaching the bridge so that even GPS-hypnotized drivers can't cause any more damage. But these barriers will stand as a mute and expensive testimony to the inability of modern humans to embrace the whole of their environment, instead of giving in to a tunnel-vision version of reality simplified to a creeping colored line on a map.
Or maybe, just maybe, the world will heed the call of prophets such as McGilchrist and pull back from the brink of disaster that we seem to be teetering on. If history is any guide, though, it will be hard to stop ourselves in time. And this go-round, we may damage a lot more than a few bridges.
Sources: The Associated Press article "Historic covered bridges are under threat by truck drivers relying on GPS meant for cars" by Lisa Rathke appeared on Mar. 20 at https://apnews.com/article/covered-bridges-gps-truckers-accidents-906e3379e07b20dbcdbe16e7cf5e5d6d. I also referred to the Wikipedia article on covered bridges. Iain McGilchrist's article "Resist the Machine Apocalypse" appeared in the March 2024 issue of First Things, and can be viewed at https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/03/resist-the-machine-apocalypse.
No comments:
Post a Comment