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Comment by shiftpgdn | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the state should take responsibility and realize that poorly maintained and marked roads lead to accidents that cause injury, including death.

The Model X that hit the barriers in the Bay Area would not have happened if A. Lane marker painting had been kept under maintenance. They were mostly missing.

B. The crash barrier had been in place, instead it was missing from an earlier crash. The missing arresting system caused the car to strike the Jersey barriers with no safety controls. This is the equivalent of driving into a 6" wide concrete wall at freeway speed.

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Sure, there is some amount of fault for the system needing more maintenance. But road conditions are often going to be far from perfect, and that crash is certainly not atypical conditions.

Either California can shut down the entire highway for a week until they replace the crash barrier, or Tesla can build their self-driving cars to be able to recognize only moderately faded white lines.

That's my point. A human driver had hit those barriers just ten days prior. If there is a part of the road people are driving into constantly maybe we should look at road design over drivers.

This is definitely a major challenge for driver assistance features. Poorly maintained roads are less of a burden to humans who can more easily account for flaws in road design or maintenance.

What is also a major issue is lack of design patterns on roads. Rather than using a standard set of merging lanes, circles, right and left turn lanes, etc, there are hundreds of variations across municipalities. What makes it worse is that even the patterns in a single municipality aren’t often followed. We notice this when driving on 290 from Austin to Houston where the turn lanes are sometimes marked with a white line on the left and other times marked with a yellow line.

It’s going to take a concerted effort by legislature to help driver assistance and self driving cars by adjusting roads to make them safer rather than the free-for-all we have now.

It also would not have happened if a human was driving.

Do you mean except for the crash barrier that the earlier crash destroyed?

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