There is a road in Boston where the same thing happens every September. People rent a moving truck, load it with dorm furniture or a one-bedroom apartment, follow Google Maps along the Charles River, and drive directly into a low stone bridge that has been there for decades. The truck's roof peels back. Traffic stops for an hour. A tow truck removes what is left. And then, sometimes the same day, it happens again to someone else.
The road is Storrow Drive. The phenomenon has its own verb. To get "Storrowed" is to drive a truck taller than the bridges into one of the bridges, on a road that has been signed "Cars Only" for as long as anyone can remember. It is so reliable a feature of Boston life that locals plan around it: there are social media accounts dedicated to documenting it, a recurring annual news cycle, and an online community that posts photos of fresh Storrowings within hours of them happening.
This post is not really about Boston. It is about why Storrowing keeps happening, why it happens almost exclusively to people renting a moving truck for the first time, and what every rental driver should know before turning the key on a 26-foot box truck.
What Storrowing Is
Storrow Drive is a limited-access road that runs along the south bank of the Charles River in Boston. It connects downtown to Soldiers Field Road and the western suburbs, paralleling the Massachusetts Turnpike a few blocks to the south. The bridges that span Storrow Drive carry crossing roads, footpaths, and ramp systems, and several of them have clearances in the ten- to eleven-foot range.
The road is signed as prohibited to trucks, buses, vehicles with trailers, and anything over a posted height limit. Warnings are placed at every entrance, in advance of every overpass, and at decision points where a driver could still bail out onto a different road. MassDOT has added flashing warning signs, height detectors that trigger lights, and hanging warning bars at some entrances. None of it has stopped the strikes.
What gets hit is almost never a commercial 18-wheeler. Long-haul truckers know about Storrow Drive, and their dispatch and routing systems know about it too. The vehicles that hit the bridges are rental moving trucks, box trucks, and the occasional tall RV. The drivers are people who have never driven a truck before and who are following whatever navigation app they used to drive to work that morning.
Why It Spikes Every September 1
Boston has an unusual housing rental cycle. The overwhelming majority of apartment leases in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, and Allston end on August 31 and begin on September 1. Combined with the early-September arrival of students at the city's many universities, this creates a single day on which tens of thousands of people are simultaneously moving in and out of apartments across the metro area. It is so chaotic that the Allston neighborhood has its own affectionate name for the day: Allston Christmas, named for the gifts (couches, lamps, IKEA bookshelves) left at curbs by people who decided not to move them after all.
Most of those movers are not professionals. They rent a U-Haul, a Penske, a Budget, or a Home Depot truck for the day, and they have no real experience driving anything that tall. They open their phones, type in a destination on the Cambridge side of the river, and follow whatever route the app gives them. Often, that route includes Storrow Drive or Memorial Drive across the river in Cambridge, which has its own low underpasses.
The result is predictable. Storrowings cluster heavily around September 1 every year, and Boston news outlets have run essentially the same story about it every September for over a decade.
This Is Not Just a Boston Problem
Storrow Drive is the most famous example because it has the catchy name and the annual ritual, but the same dynamic plays out at low bridges across the country.
The "Can-Opener" bridge in Durham, North Carolina, at the Norfolk Southern–Gregson Street overpass, is so reliably struck by box trucks and rental trucks that a local resident, Jürgen Henn, set up a camera across the street and has spent years documenting strikes on the site 11foot8.com. The bridge was originally posted at eleven feet, eight inches; in 2019 it was raised by eight inches to twelve feet, four inches. It still gets hit, just by slightly taller trucks than before.
New York City's parkway system was deliberately built in the 1930s with low stone-arched bridges designed to keep commercial vehicles off scenic routes like the Belt Parkway, the Henry Hudson Parkway, the Hutchinson River Parkway, and the Saw Mill River Parkway. The signs at every entrance say "No Commercial Vehicles" and "Cars Only." Rental trucks still end up on these roads regularly, routed there by navigation apps that do not know or care about vehicle restrictions.
The George Washington Memorial Parkway and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway around Washington, D.C., have similar restrictions and the same recurring problem. Stretches of the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut do too. The pattern is identical: a scenic, restricted, low-clearance road that was never meant for trucks, and a steady stream of rental drivers being routed onto it by apps that treat their truck like a sedan.
Why Rental Drivers Are the Highest-Risk Group
Commercial truck drivers have training, dispatch systems, and in many cases truck-specific GPS units that flag low bridges. The driver of a 26-foot U-Haul has none of that. The risk factors stack:
Most rental drivers have never driven a truck before. They have no intuition for how tall their vehicle is, no habit of looking up at clearance signs, and no awareness that the truck they are driving is meaningfully different from the SUV in their driveway.
Rental truck heights are also higher than most renters assume. A typical 26-foot moving truck is somewhere in the twelve-to-thirteen-foot range depending on the model. That is significantly taller than nearly every passenger vehicle, taller than many delivery vans, and tall enough to hit a meaningful share of urban overpasses.
Rental drivers usually rely on Google Maps, Apple Maps, or Waze. None of those apps consider vehicle height when planning routes. None of them know your truck is twelve feet tall. They will route you under a ten-foot bridge with the same cheerful confidence they would route a sedan under it.
The drive is usually a one-time event. Someone moving across town or across the country is unlikely to buy specialized navigation software for what they think of as a single trip. So they go with what they have. What they have does not know about low bridges.
The combination is a recipe for predictable failure: inexperienced driver, taller-than-expected vehicle, navigation app that ignores the variable that matters, and an unfamiliar route. The only surprise about Storrowing and its cousins elsewhere is that anyone is still surprised by it.
What Actually Happens When You Hit a Bridge
The first thing that happens is the top of the truck makes a sound the driver will remember for the rest of their life. The second is that the truck stops, often violently. Cargo inside the box is thrown forward, and anything fragile is destroyed. The roof typically peels back from the front edge, sometimes cleanly enough that observers describe it as looking like a sardine can.
Then come the slower, more expensive things. The road is closed while emergency crews assess the damage. The bridge itself is inspected before traffic resumes. The rental truck has to be towed, often with specialized equipment because the truck cannot fit through tunnels or under other low overpasses on the way to the lot. The cargo has to be transferred, usually to another rental truck the driver now has to arrange on short notice.
The financial side depends heavily on what insurance the renter purchased and what the rental contract says. Standard rental damage waivers commonly exclude damage caused by driving into a fixed object the driver should have avoided, or by driving on a road the vehicle was not permitted on. Many renters discover, after the fact, that the optional damage protection they did or did not buy does not cover a bridge strike. Replacement cost on a totaled box truck runs well into five figures. Liability for damage to the bridge structure itself can run higher.
The exact numbers vary by rental company, by state, and by the specifics of the contract. The general shape is the same everywhere: a renter who thought their damage waiver protected them learns that it did not, and is on the hook for an amount of money that is large relative to the cost of the move.
How Not to Be Next
The advice is short and unglamorous.
Before you pick up the rental, look up the exterior height of the truck model on the rental company's website. U-Haul, Penske, Budget, and Home Depot all publish these. Write the number down.
Once you have the truck, set that height in whatever navigation app you are going to use. If you are using Google Maps, Apple Maps, or Waze, setting the height does nothing, because those apps do not consider it. That is the problem you need to solve before you start driving.
For a one-time move, the cheapest solution is a navigation app that actually considers vehicle height. HeadRoom offers a seven-day free trial, which is plenty for a typical move. You enter your truck's height, the app routes you around bridges that are too low, and you do not end up on Storrow Drive on September 1.
If you are not going to use a height-aware app, the fallback is to plan your route in advance on a satellite map, look at every bridge along the way, and stay on Interstates and major US highways wherever possible. Interstates are typically built to clear at least fourteen feet, often sixteen, which is enough for most rental trucks. State highways, scenic parkways, and local roads do not have that guarantee, and parkways are often explicitly designed to exclude trucks.
If your rental company sticks a warning on the dash telling you to avoid parkways and low-clearance roads, take it seriously. That sticker exists because of the pattern this whole post is about.
The Common Thread
Storrowing is not a quirk of one road in Boston. It is what happens whenever a one-time rental driver meets a low bridge and a navigation app that does not consider vehicle height. The road in Boston is just the most photogenic example, with the best name and the most predictable annual cycle.
If you are about to drive a truck taller than your everyday vehicle, even for a single trip, you are in the demographic this happens to. The fix is small, cheap, and takes about five minutes to set up.
Start a free 7-day trial of HeadRoom, enter the height of your rental truck, and let the app keep you off the roads that eat box trucks for a living.
