Why Do People Think They Can Ignore Weight Limits on Bridges?

It isn't the first bridge to collapse because of overwieght trucks, and it won't be the last. 4 dead in collapse of highway flyover in central China

So an 11-year-old highway bridge collapsed in China last week, killing 4 people.

The accident occurred at about 3:30 p.m. Saturday in the city of Ezhou, with about 500 meters (1,640 feet) of the bridge built over an expressway collapsing onto the roadway below, according to transport and police authorities.

Early indications are that a truck weighing nearly 200 tons was on the bridge when it failed.

Preliminary investigations revealed that a truck weighing a total of 198 tons had broken into two pieces while falling off the structure. The newspaper Beijing News said the truck was four times over the allowable weight limit on the flyover.

Trucks in this country are usually limited to about 80,000 pounds. That truck in China weighed in at 396,000 pounds. Which is amazing. (Though I guess the weight limit in China is more like 100,000 pounds.)

I'll bet that it is not the first time a truck weighing significantly more than the limit has gone over that bridge. "Nothing failed the first time, so we can obviously ignore the limits. We can just keep piling on the load, right?" I will also bet that no one responsible for the decision to wildly overload trucks were one of the 4 people who died. They probably don't even know the people who died. Because there is very little Justice in the universe.

And it isn't just in China where people ignore the weight limits. Here is a case in France, and a case in Missouri.