Is it possible to climb Golden Gate bridge legally? Or any other bridges in the USA?
I know this is allowed in some places. In Sydney, climbing Harbor Bridge is a tourist experience. see bridgeclimb.com
Illegally climbing the Golden Gate bridge at dawn (2011)
101–110 of 127 posts
Re: Illegally climbing the Golden Gate bridge at dawn (2011)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I hooked up [two] my shock absorbing lanyards" You really didn't read it, did you?
"shock absorbing lanyards" could be anything, and there's a whole lot of personal anchors that people think will protect them, but actually won't. Better?
How could he have been more specific that he was using an adequate safety device? Were you expecting him to include the brand?
Re: Illegally climbing the Golden Gate bridge at dawn (2011)
#103> In a choice between a 300-foot-fall to water and a 30-foot-fall to concrete the winner is discernable if not immediately clear I'm guessing the correct choice is the concrete, but for some reason I feel like I would still prefer to go for the water...
This is why I love the TV show Mythbusters: they routinely demonstrate how our intuition on these matters is wrong. (A 30-foot fall onto concrete might still kill you, but a 300-foot fall into water will definitely kill you. And if the fall onto concrete doesn't kill you, it will be much easier to get you the medical attention you need if you're not floating in San Francisco Bay).
Mythbusters busted that myth. Water is preferable to concrete they determined...
Re: Illegally climbing the Golden Gate bridge at dawn (2011)
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
"shock absorbing lanyards" could be anything, and there's a whole lot of personal anchors that people think will protect them, but actually won't. Better?
How could he have been more specific that he was using an adequate safety device? Were you expecting him to include the brand?
If he attached the lanyards to anything other than a harness, a fall would end poorly. I've seen people mis-rig harnesses - actual paid professionals who got hurried and got stupid - in ways that would have maimed or killed them if they fell.
Re: Illegally climbing the Golden Gate bridge at dawn (2011)
#105I'm really not sure how I feel about these things. On one hand, these are great escapades, and they result in fantastic pictures. I do like seeing "forbidden and forgotten areas". On the other hand, I would never want to encourage anyone to do something like this. It's illegal for a reason. The reason is not just your own safety. If he had fallen on to the road side of the bridge, not only would he die, but he would…
> It's illegal for a reason.
Thou shalt remember the 11th commandment and keep it wholly.
Re: Illegally climbing the Golden Gate bridge at dawn (2011)
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've only been there once, but I'm picking that harsh weather, height and the need for attachment points outside the existing bridge make it expensive. I'm not at all surprised that it is expensive, but I am that it hasn't been done yet.
A primary complaint, believe it or not, is that the net would hurt the aesthetics of the bridge. People have been pushing for a net for years, but a variety of (lame) excuses keep conspiring against it. The reality is that there's no really good reason to keep from doing it...just a lot of little bad ones that seem to win.
How about "it's not society's job to keep people (even insane ones) from doing what they want with their own bodies"?
You can take this to apply to everything from the inside of one's uterus to hurling oneself off a bridge.
Re: Illegally climbing the Golden Gate bridge at dawn (2011)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
"shock absorbing lanyards" could be anything, and there's a whole lot of personal anchors that people think will protect them, but actually won't. Better?
How could he have been more specific that he was using an adequate safety device? Were you expecting him to include the brand?
A snapshot of his setup would have been nice. Not so much for the gear Nazis, but to keep gear on the radar for readers who decide to try this themselves.
Re: Illegally climbing the Golden Gate bridge at dawn (2011)
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've only been there once, but I'm picking that harsh weather, height and the need for attachment points outside the existing bridge make it expensive. I'm not at all surprised that it is expensive, but I am that it hasn't been done yet.
A primary complaint, believe it or not, is that the net would hurt the aesthetics of the bridge. People have been pushing for a net for years, but a variety of (lame) excuses keep conspiring against it. The reality is that there's no really good reason to keep from doing it...just a lot of little bad ones that seem to win.
How about, "The net is estimated to cost $45m and California is broke"?
Re: Illegally climbing the Golden Gate bridge at dawn (2011)
#109Re: Illegally climbing the Golden Gate bridge at dawn (2011)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
not sure what this had to do the parent comment, but if there's a net, people will find other ways. It's like making prostitution illegal, did it really cut down on the number of people having sex? Of course not.
As said by Scott, suicide is very rarely a well thought-out action. It's something that is decided on a whim and often passes just as quickly. Drug companies in Britain experimented by putting pills in blister packs instead of bottles and found out that suicide rates dropped dramatically. Apparently, the amount of time it took to pull each individual pill out of the blister pack was enough to make people think about…
I'd never considered blister packs as an impulse control measure before; I had assumed it was for ease of dosing/packaging, and perhaps longer shelf-life (The US approach of (until relatively recent automation improvements) manually counting pills into a bottle always struck me as inefficient).
A short transcript[1] from the podcast agrees though, and there's a currently previous[2] and ongoing[3] research into packaging/impulsivity.
There's some other research as well that shows that restricting pack size of OTC paracetamol/acetaminophen reduces suicides, too[4]
[1] http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/05/17/why-cant-you-buy-a-bi...
[2] http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=ht...
[3] http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01118208
[4] http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...