The call came in around 9:40 on a September morning. Guy had a 16-foot rental, four roommates, and everything they owned in the back. He'd been on Soldiers Field Road, saw a sign for the river, and figured the pretty road along the water had to be faster than Comm Ave with a thousand other trucks on it.
It was. For about a mile.
Then he met a stone arch bridge built for Model A Fords, and the top eighteen inches of the truck stayed with the bridge while the rest of it kept going. Somebody's IKEA dresser ended up in the eastbound lane. That's Storrowing.
Why Storrow Drive eats trucks
James J. Storrow Memorial Drive runs along the Charles and it is cars only. No trucks, no buses, no exceptions. The bridges over it are low stone arches from another century, and nobody's going to rebuild them, so the state signs it and hopes. Memorial Drive on the Cambridge side and Soldiers Field Road heading toward Brighton have the same problem. In 2021 there were six Storrowings on Storrow itself, plus one on Memorial and one on Soldiers Field.
The signs are there. People miss them because a rented box truck doesn't feel like a truck when you're driving it. It feels like a tall van.
September 1 is the whole ballgame
Somewhere around two-thirds to 70% of leases in this city end on September 1, because the academic calendar runs everything and there are more than 150,000 students in the metro. The city hands out over 3,000 moving-truck parking permits that weekend. Allston Christmas — the couch-on-the-curb festival — produced 38 tons of curb waste and 1,700 abandoned mattresses in 2023 alone.
So you get thousands of first-time truck drivers, most of them 22, most of them from somewhere flat, all moving on the same day into the tightest streets in the region. Allston and Brighton are wall-to-wall triple-deckers with resident-permit-only parking and driveways cut in at angles that were legal in 1908. Double-parked trucks block those driveways. Blocked driveways get towed. That's a separate spike from the Storrowings, and it runs all week.
One thing people from out of state don't clock: Brookline and Cambridge are their own cities with their own permit rules and their own tow contractors. Your Boston sticker means nothing once you cross Saint Paul Street. We get calls every year from someone who parked "in Boston" and was actually forty feet into Brookline.
What a Storrowed truck recovery actually looks like
People picture a tow. It's more like a scene cleanup with a truck attached.
- The road closes first. Nobody's hooking anything until State Police shut the lanes, because there's box-truck roof, cargo, and usually glass across two lanes.
- The truck is wedged. A sheared truck doesn't roll back out. The peeled roof skin catches on the arch. Sometimes it comes out backward under its own power, sometimes it has to be winched, sometimes the box has to be cut.
- It goes on a flatbed, not a hook. A box truck with structural damage up top and a load shifted forward isn't something you drag by the wheels down a parkway. Flatbed, every time.
- The contents are their own job. Everything in that box moved. Whatever's not broken has to come off before the truck goes anywhere.
The tow bill is rarely the worst number of that day. The rental agreement is.
What to do instead, in about thirty seconds of planning
Know your height and write it on a sticky note on the dash. Then stay off the parkways entirely — Storrow, Memorial, Soldiers Field. Use Comm Ave, Brighton Ave, Cambridge Street, the ugly roads with the potholes. They're slower and they don't have 10-foot bridges. Set the GPS to truck mode or turn it off and read signs, because Google Maps will happily route a moving truck down Storrow. It thinks you're a Camry.
And if you're the one who got towed rather than the one who got scalped by a bridge: the City of Boston lot is at 200 Frontage Road in the South End, open Mon–Fri 7 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. with 24/7 automated release kiosks. City tow is $90 plus $3/hour storage, capped at $15 a day, and paying by card adds 2.5%. Plate lookup lives at cityofboston.gov/towing/search. Tow Line is 617-343-4629, the lot is 617-635-3900. If BPD ordered the tow, you have to clear it at the station before the private company will hand the car back — showing up at the lot first just costs you a trip.
Private-lot tows are a different animal with different rules: the DPU caps an involuntary tow from private property at $132 and storage at $35 per 24 hours for a regular car. And if you get back to the lot while the truck is still hooked up but hasn't pulled out, the drop fee is capped at half the tow — that one's worth knowing at 11 p.m. behind a triple-decker in Allston.
We run flatbeds out of Boston and cover the run down I-93 through Charlestown to Braintree, so we see the September 1 mess from both ends. If you've got a truck stuck under something, or a car that got moved while you were carrying a mattress up three flights, call us or start from the main page — but honestly, the cheaper version of this article is: take Comm Ave.