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Comment by z6 | Hacker News Reader

No real excuse for Tesla, but seriously why are our roads so bad. This is one of the wealthiest areas in the world and a busy stretch of road.

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> but seriously why are our roads so bad.

Degraded paint does not a bad road make. Roads are optimized for human drivers that can leverage additional context to make their decisions. Many countries don't even bother to stripe their roads at all.

Huh? Which developed countries don't have road markings on highways? Paint is just one aspect. There are also plenty of cracks and uneven pavement as you can see from the street view.

You said road, he said road. The additional caveat of “highway” wasn’t added until you realized his mental model was different than yours.

Now imagine trying to teach a car these things!

A highway is a road. The context is quite clear since we're talking about the crash site.

Exactly! To you its crystal clear, but if the other party were additionally considering all the non-highway accidents, then the distinction may not be so clear to them until you provided the additional metadata.

Now consider how you may feel about a car which has decided based on all available data that this strip of road is a lane. Its crystal clear to that car until its suddenly not.

You reacted with what appeared to me to be very restrained aggression (typical and acceptable, no offense intended) as you struggled to figure out if they were just being dense on purpose or were actually ignorant. I dont feel either were accurate but your message conveyed that was what you felt to me.

A car simply says “hey i dont know what im doing anymore. Help!”

Chicago doesn't stripe most of the roads. Most of the roads that have stripes in Chicago are administered by IDOT.

Chicago even has this codified in the traffic code; while the rest of the state has "improper lane usage" as a violation, Chicago has "failure to maintain a lane".

Even on roads with painted markings they get scraped off by snowplows almost every winter. I'm reasonably sure that's what happened to that gore.

The barrier that wasn't replaced does.

Human drivers made the same mistake, though. That's why the crash attenuator had been destroyed and why the Tesla driver died: a human had made the same mistake and used up the crash attenuator, thus making the Tesla accident fatal.

When I lived in California, I was shocked at how bad the roads are and how poor the signage was (since many of the signs get stolen and are not replaced for months or years). A moderate thunderstorm knocked out power in some parts of LA for weeks. It really seems like there are some parts of the government and utilities that are sclerotic.

Alameda St, just north of I10, is in such poor condition that it’s practically third-world. I’m usually so concerned with damage to my suspension that I avoid it.

Los Angeles has a very interesting set of problems. Chief among them is the repercussions from closing roads/highways for repairs. It’s often times better, I think, to let them suffer in disrepair than it is to close them for any length of time. With semi-autonomous cars, however, I wonder if there will be greater pressure to keep them in repair.

Freeways are constantly repaired. They just do it at night. They don't 100% shut it down, they close down all but 1-2 lanes. I used to make a lot of night trips from San Francisco to San Jose, and I ran into them pretty often.

It’s kind of by design. America, compared to a lot of other western nations, has structured society to funnel more wealth into corporations, individuals and the military, and less into most other government functions. There are plenty of advantages to this strategy, but well maintained roads aren’t one of them.

Wealthy individuals/corporations but poor roads (and other government infrastructure/services) isn’t unexpected, it’s more or less the goal.

Imagine what the roads look like in areas that aren’t nearly as wealthy. 11% of all roads in North Carolina west of Asheville are unpaved. Some counties have 200 miles of unpaved secondary roads. The primary roadway surfaces are far from perfect too.

Prop 13 severely curbs the ability of local governments in wealthy parts of California to offer improved public services.

One problem which plagues my state: the money spent on fighting fires last summer had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere was a portion of the budget for road maintenance.

California had a lot of fires it had to fight last year. Where did that budget come from?

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