Fredericton businesses cash in on walking bridge truck crashes
- Brianna Lyttle
- Nov 3
- 3 min read
The Bill Thorpe Walking Bridge on Waterloo Row has seen a series of transport trucks get stuck under the overpass due to wrongfully estimating the maximum height. Two of these crashes occurred within the same week, leading to the situation becoming a Fredericton-wide joke that was capitalized on by businesses and social media influencers.
Kane “Kaner” Fitzpatrick, best known for posting daily videos on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat as the widely followed @kaner_bud, has been living in Fredericton for three years while studying kinesiology and recreation and sports studies.
He said he has never seen so many truck crashes happen in such a short span of time.
“I think it’s ridiculous. Honestly, I think that the sign above should be enough to tell and people’s own judgment should be enough to tell that they’re not to drive under a big walking bridge.”
Fitzpatrick found out about the two back-to-back crashes when he drove by both of them. With much of his content poking fun at New Brunswick life and garnering thousands of interactions for doing so, it was a no-brainer to make a video when the crashes occurred.
“Somebody told me and I was gonna go record a video for it. I was like, ‘There’s no way this happened again,’” said Fitzpatrick.
Fitzpatrick was a “big fan” of the New England Pizza Company, which did a giveaway themed around the crashes. Owner Chris Babineau said in an interview with CBC that $100 gift cards were doled out to multiple people who correctly guessed when the next crash occurred.
Like Babineau, Chad McGarity decided that his business, Traffic Zone Signs and Supplies, needed to do something after the two back-to-back crashes. The business held a giveaway, promising a free custom sign and $150 gift card to whoever could guess the date of the next crash.
“We tend to jump on trends and whatnot, just to raise awareness for the situation, hoping it doesn't happen again, but also … to have a little bit of fun,” said McGarity.
McGarity has always been known for being “down-to-earth” to his customers, so this latest giveaway was nothing out of the ordinary. It also had the benefit of increasing sales, particularly for the customizable traffic signs.
“When people are looking for things and they see something like this pop up, it kind of reminds everybody what we do.”
The psychology behind the phenomenon of finding collective humour in mishaps can be explained by a series of studies done in 2012 examining what participants found funny in a “humour lab.”
According to Psychology Today, the studies showed that small mishaps when occurring in the moment were often funny but decreased in humour over time, whereas bigger tragedies tended to increase in funniness once significant time had passed.
Humour is also noted to be a common coping mechanism in uncertain, dire situations in which finding the humour helped to regain a lost sense of control.
Fitzpatrick’s Instagram video about the Sept. 17 incident garnered over 1,700 likes, with the New England Pizza Company’s giveaway post on Facebook having 1,900 comments and nearly 600 shares at the time of writing.
If one thing has united Fredericton, it is the strange humour of the overpass crashes.
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