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Comment by bertil | Hacker News Reader

I’m a little puzzled by the over-engineering. Wouldn’t fixing the road be much cheaper and benefit more people?

Don’t get me wrong: lowering the cost of active suspension is a wonderful idea, and will have a ton of benefit, but…

In the USA, highway building and maintenance is paid out of the highway trust fund, which is filled from the federal fuel tax. That fund doesn’t receive enough money to maintain highway quality.

This being the USA, the average citizen doesn’t accept the fact that “we would like to have better roads” may mean “we need to raise the fuel tax”, so, instead, they pay, on average, $515 per year in extra car repairs, so that they can keep their payments on fuel taxes at a low $97 (according to https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/25/why-d...)

There's also many roads (that are reasonably considered highways) that are maintained using state and local funds.

(for example, in Michigan, counties, townships and incorporated municipalities all fund work on roads)

I don't mean that as an argument against your point about spending money in the wrong spot, just pointing out that the trust fund isn't the only spending.

Pennsylvania is the same - there is a $0.58 tax on a gallon of gas ($0.75 on diesel) that is used to fund the majority of the costs related to road maintenance. Wikipedia tells me that is the highest fuel tax rate in the country - the roads must be incredibly expensive to maintain in this state because they are generally in significantly worse shape than the roads in neighboring states.

In Germany, total taxation on gasoline is around 0.85 € per liter (3.2 € per "gallon"); less for diesel.

Yeah, every state is spending on roads. I was talking about the additional ~1500 entities in Michigan that also have road budgets. It's only really the 83 counties that are building larger roads though.

Pennsylvania does have a large number of miles of road.

However Pennsylvania has a large amount of corruption in the state government also...

Alternatively, take a tiny fraction of what we spend on 'defense' and send it to the highway trust fund. The federal government has a problem with prioritization, not with lack of funds.

The federal gas tax was and still is 18.4 cents/gallon. It would need to be raised to 77.7 cents/gallon. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/7/24/some-perspecti... Worse, that was in 2014.

I believe, at least in California, raising gas tax is frowned upon by voters because the so called highway fund (filled with gas tax money) has been raided to pay for non-road related projects.

No one likes bait and switch.

Er, wouldn’t fixing the road be the overengineering? One solution requires a single company to build a single bus to solve a specific problem. The other requires every municipality in the country to “fix the road” (unclear what that even means?) to solve for a specific problem affecting one specific use case.

I was anticipating that fixing potholes would benefit all the vehicles on that road and that you would save a lot on vehicle’s suspension.

Yeah, but they're not the government's vehicles, so what do they care?

I’m not generally very comfortable with cynicism when it comes to road safety.

I’m a little puzzled by the over-engineering. Wouldn’t fixing the road be much cheaper and benefit more people?

My information might be over a decade out of date, but the last time I read about it, the US and Italy did not require warranties on roads, but Germany did. As a result, companies are constantly charging money from the government in the US and Italy to repair mediocre roads, while German roads are overall excellent and do not require frequent repair.

Funny how that works.

> while German roads are overall excellent and do not require frequent repair.

Well certainly better on average than some other countries, but certainly not what I'd call excellent by any stretch of the imagination.

I only know what it was like around Stuttgart in the early 2000's. Compared to Pennsylvania in the 80's, it looked like utopia!

Stuttgart suffered a "traffic stroke" since then, so to speak. The roads may be fine, but the traffic isn't. Interestingly things have taken a noticeable turn to the worse since the Greens were elected to state government... some say they invented "red wave" traffic lights. I'm not sure if that's true, but if you're driving to Stuttgart, pack an extra pack of brake light bulbs -- they might burn out on you.

Ha, that’s a good point! I drove from Paris to Bordeaux a few months ago and was blown away by the quality of the French interstate—it was perfectly smooth, zero potholes, impeccable lines and signage. Of course it had the most expensive tolls I’ve ever heard of, but as an American, it made me think about whether higher tolls would be worth it, if we could be sure the money would actually go into better infrastructure.

Anyway, I bet a similar bed-in-bus system on that French highway wouldn’t require this bump-cancellation tech, so you make a good point, at least from a technical standpoint. Politically, now that’s a different story ...

I checked: Paris-Bordeaux toll is 55€ (US$63 with tax) for 563km (350 miles) of highway, 583km total. Add 34L (9 US gal., 39MPG!) of fuel @1.5€/L (US$6.6 per gallon) that is 51€ of fuel. So toll+fuel total, that's at least 106€ ($122) one way. Now you have to take into account the car rent/lease/depreciation+maintenance. You're likely better off with the train (2 hours and 8 minutes) unless you carpool.

Roads are huge and are deteriorating all the time. Keeping the road in a state suitable for people to sleep in a normal bus would not be cheap, and maybe even impossible.

I grew up in Europe where highways are perfectly smooth overall. There are bumps in the city, but you are not really meant to drive fast on those. This is to a point that I have met some native French speakers who wouldn’t know the word for “potholes” in French.

The bus company isn't in charge of the roads. They have little ability to change the quality of the road, all they can do is improve their buses.

Domino’s Pizza seemed to have taken upon themselves to act on that. I suspect that this is because it was the cheaper option for them.

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