‘Warning chimes’ installed around Kansas City’s truck-eating bridge. How do they work?

New safety devices along Independence Avenue may mean fewer collisions for Kansas City’s notorious ‘truck-eating bridge.’

Built in 1912, the bridge is something of a local celebrity in the Historic Northeast. It has its own Facebook group with over 13,000 members. It’s the subject of internet memes and evocative fan art. Google even calls it a “historical landmark,” referring to it only as “The Bridge.”

The infamous bridge can be found on the southern border of the Indian Mound neighborhood, where railroad tracks cut across Independence Avenue and create a tight underpass for vehicle traffic. Many truck drivers have learned the hard way that the bridge has a clearance of just 12 feet — shorter than the height of most large trucks.

Now, the city hopes that new warning “curtains” on either side of the bridge will alert trucks that they’re too tall to squeeze underneath before it’s too late.

“We love our undefeated champion, but want to ensure drivers and goods are safe and the bridge gets a rest from its eating schedule for a while,” wrote Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas in a Thursday post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

How will the new ‘curtains’ warn drivers about the bridge?

The curtains, also called “warning chimes,” work like a wind chime: a line of hollow plastic rods will hang over the roadway at a height of 12 feet. When trucks taller than that strike them, they produce loud reverberating sounds that warn drivers before they collide with the upcoming bridge.

City spokesperson Courtney Stephens said that the rods are made from a high-density plastic called HDPE. Each “curtain” will consist of around 26 of them hanging from a horizontal metal beam.

The city’s new warning curtains represent the culmination of years of research and a funding partnership between Kansas City and the Kansas City Terminal Railway Company, which owns the tracks that cross over Independence Avenue.

Kansas City first allocated funding to study the bridge and its regular collisions in 2018. In 2022, the city and the railway agreed to co-fund the $150,000 construction of these warning curtains, which are also in use around low-clearance bridges in cities like San Antonio, Texas and Spokane, Washington.

Like the ones in these other cities, the Independence Avenue Bridge already has warning signs and flashing lights alerting drivers to the low clearance ahead.

But these signals haven’t proven effective at stopping collisions — leading to the need for a more creative solution.

The Star’s Robert Cronkleton contributed reporting to this piece.

Do you have more questions about infrastructure in Kansas City? Ask the Service Journalism team at kcq@kcstar.com.