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Comment by markbnj | Hacker News Reader

I often remarked in the same vein to my daughters as they were growing up and learning to drive. Everywhere you encounter a stop sign, a light, etc., is a place where people were badly injured or killed on multiple occasions. That stuff is there for a reason.

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New road construction starts with stop signs and traffic lights. They don't just leave it a free-for-all and add them later on.

Now, when you see quadruple stop signs (i.e. 16 total) and a jury-rigged flashing red light attached to them, as there was in my home town, chances are that one came about after some accidents.

There's this place in Atlanta where one makes a 180 turn from one interstate to another. They added flashing lights, paint all over the place, signs. Still, there are so many vehicles going off the road that no grass ever grows there. Here's the Google Street view of the dirt patch, complete with vehicle debris which accumulates almost every day.

https://www.google.com/maps/@33.7939354,-84.3917037,3a,75y,1...

From street view that doesn't seem that difficult to negotiate - is it just distracted/low skill drivers? Speeds too high?

On a side note - zooming out from that, the sprawl of Atlanta looks unlivable. On several nearby highways I counted 18+ lanes!

Having negotiated this particular turn many times, I'd guess it's a combination of factors. Atlanta is spread out so the highways are typically long and straight, so apart from rush hour the fast lane typically goes 70-80 mph comfortably. Even on highways, you're usually ok to reduce speed to 60 mph to make interstate turns, e.g. spaghetti junction (85/285). Interstate turns this sharp are very rare so even natives need to be alert. I-75 is a long multi-state road so many out-of-towners may not be expecting the sharpness of this turn. Not sure if this plays into it, but it does also exit from the fast lane.

There's a "Right Lane Ends" sign right there, and I'd imagine people unfamiliar with the turn see that sign and their brain just can't catch up with trying to process both slowing down for the 25mph turn and a left merge.

Might be better to have the left merge occur before the turn, then do the turn. Otherwise you're doing several things at once: Merging, slowing down, and maintaining direction around a turn with a changing radius. Two of those would probably be challenging at once.

Ha, I grew up in Atlanta but left 12 years ago and haven't been back. I immediately knew exactly the spot you were talking about.

At what point do you change the turn? Signs and paint is great, but maybe the fundamentals are just bad.

That road is knackered too - is that a commmon state for roads around there?

The roads in the US are in general horribly maintained. I've driven across it north/south 8-10 times and east/west 4 times along different routes/not just freeways and it's rare to find great roads. Michigan was the worst but luckily starting/ending in Ontario we weren't often on their roads for long.

Sorta depends where you're at. In cities that have hot summers and cold winters (Spokane, etc.) you get terrible roads. Poorer parts of cities have worse roads than richer parts (compare north Tacoma to basically the rest of Tacoma).

In suburban, high-traffic†, low-traffic†, or moderate climate areas the roads are fine. In fact some of the freeways around where I live have been putting in the "quiet asphalt" stuff— driving is quiet, even in my 2000 Corolla!

† High traffic areas get attention because they get beat up easily. Low traffic highways do not get as beat up. This still kinda depends on who maintains the road, how rich the surrounding area is, climate, etc.

Weather is really important. For all the traffic it has, the freeways in LA are generally not that bad. 300 days of sunshine and no freezing temps helps a lot.

That's why I specified how widely travelled I was. I definitely understand weather related issues having grown up in Ontario with a 50-60c swing in temps over the course of a year + salt. But I saw lots of awful roads in the north east, the south, midwest, south west, west, and north west.

It's pretty safe to say that in general US roads are poorly maintained. Like saying in general UK rail is poorly maintained.

Sometimes it's quite explicit: in Korea there are signs saying 사망사고 발생지점, literally, "Place of a fatal accident".

The problem is that sometimes that part of the road isn't even particularly dangerous, so I wonder what was the rationale for forever reminding people that somebody died there...

I remember little white crosses on the side of the road in Montana. If a turn had a number of crosses that was a pretty good indication that you really need to be careful.

In Costa Rica, for a number of years a few years ago, they would paint a hollow yellow heart, with a halo, inside a box, on top of the part of a street or road where a fatal accident occurred. However, after some time, they stopped repainting them after each time the road was resurfaced.

Obviously that's not even remotely true, so why are you telling your daughters that?

Don't lie to your kids. They're smarter than you think.

Napkin math suggests you are wrong, the grand parent is right.

I can't find the exact stats but in the US there are 2+ million injuries per year caused by road traffic crashes. We know there are around 300k signalized intersections [1]. If we estimate non-signalized intersections (ie. those with STOP signs) to 20x that number, that's 6 million non-signalized intersections. If 20% of injuries happen at intersections and are randomly distributed across intersections, then on average there will be 1 injury at a given intersection every 15 years.

So yeah it is likely that "multiple injuries" have occured at mosts intersections in the country.

[1] http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/knowledge/faqs/faq_part4.htm#tcsgq...

Where I live, there are at least a couple hundred stop signs and two (2) traffic signals. That's probably closer to a typical ratio for suburbs and smaller towns. I doubt there's ever been a serious accident at most of those intersections, and certainly not as the catalyst for putting up all the signs. The major accidents happen on the highways outside of town, during blizzards.

Perhaps you should ask your local roads department how they decide where to put traffic control structures before talking about lying :).

If you think the answer to that question is going to be, "Whenever somebody gets hurt," then I'd say you're the one who needs to place that particular call.

We know that highway speed limits aren't generally optimized for safety, for instance: https://www.motorists.org/issues/speed-limits/faq/

So in your mind how come brand new roads have road signs and lights? Nobody has been killed or injured on a road that hasn't existed before.

And don't you think they could apply some historical knowledge that a new road similar to an old one could use similar signs? Do you think the actively wait until someone gets killed before they add any signs to obviously dangerous new intersections?

That's certainly true for new construction, so I should probably qualify that I live in the northeast, where totally new roads are very rare, and almost all of our roads evolved from much earlier thoroughfares. The reality in other parts of the country is probably much different (and informed by our experience here, where the first roads in the U.S. were constructed). In this part of the country it is indeed true to say that almost all traffic control structures were placed because a particular spot caused accidents.

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