New York City has a lot of rules about which roads trucks and commercial vehicles can and can't access throughout the city, and it's for a very good reason: so that giant trucks aren't pulverizing cars, smashing fire hydrants, and generally causing chaos on residential streets. What happens when trucks don't follow the rules? You get the video below.
This incident happened in Jackson Heights on Thursday according to the uploader. As you can see in the video, the giant truck leaves a wake of destruction in its incredibly narrow path. It tears through a parked car, ripping off the side view mirror in the process; the truck's bumper is barely hanging on for dear life by the end of it; and it even knocks a fire hydrant down.
"He tried to turn left... he should have went straight," the uploader wrote on Facebook. He added that he too was confused why a the large truck was in that area in the first place: "That’s what I asked him before all this happened... He said low clearance ahead." Based on the NYC truck route map, it seems unlikely that the truck would be allowed on a side street like that.
As for what happened after the video ended, the uploader wrote, "Everyone started to back up so I had to move my car. And it was getting a lil violent over there. So I took my family and bounced." (The cherry on top of all this is the fact that the uploader narrating the video happens to sound exactly like Bradley Cooper's Rocket Raccoon.) Another witness noted, "It was crazy... Dude wouldn't give up! About 20 cars behind him yelling 'GO STRAIGHT'!"
"When I lived in Crown Heights I saw an off-route truck get stuck under the Franklin Ave shuttle tracks and block rush-hour traffic, and in Park Slope I'd have to get off the narrow avenues to avoid massive trucks who had no intentions of sharing the road with cyclists," said tipster Patricia Laws Locicero, who saw it on Reddit and sent the video to Gothamist. "I feel like this footage nicely conveys what a menace they are."
"Hopefully this encourages (or shames) the NYPD to crack down on this kind of thing," she added. We've contacted the video's uploader for more information about what happened.
