Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gene5ive | Hacker News Reader

The autobahn is safer because the drivers have better training. If we are not willing to train drivers just as well or better then we might want to stick with the train, which the Germans also have. While we're at it we can ask them how they managed to actually follow through and finish building it.

View on HN

It's also safer because the grade and turns are carefully crafted, the surface is maintained very well, and wildlife crossing is taken into consideration. You can't really say that of most US Highways.

How do they prevent poor animals from entering the roadways?

Fences and land bridges apparently. Seems like it doesn't get them all, but keeps the bigger ones out most of the time.

https://www.quora.com/Are-collisions-with-animals-a-major-pr...

I've never seen anything even remotely like that on a US highway, and I've driven around the US a lot.

To put this in perspectives I paid around 2k for my German driver’s license and had a 8 week course including theory and practical lessons. In contrast, the American one was 80 bucks or so? No lessons, just the tests

Where I grew up, pretty much everyone in the area who wanted to drive took a one semester "driver's ed" course in high school.

Driving practice with the instructor was extensive, covering pretty much every common driving scenario short of hitting a deer. To even take the test, you had to have X hours logged driving with an adult who had a license.

Yes, the license is substantially cheaper, but it was also a very rural area- driving a car is just a fact of life out there, and 2k for the license would probably have cost more than quite a few of the cars.

I didn't have a semester-long driver's ed, but there was a class for a series of Saturdays at a local AAA office, with a guy who spent much of the time showing us old-school Cosby stand-up, and four sessions of driving instruction with an AAA instructor. This was worth the money to my parents because they got a savings on insurance.

If we were riding horses and buggies we would not need to even go to driving school and get a driver's license. Only when something is a necessary condition it happens, to have the same level driver-education here as in Germany first you need higher speed limits.

Not to be snarky, but the person to ask first about it's construction is Adolph Hitler, unfortunately. "Hitler's autobahn construction began in September 1933 under the direction of chief engineer Fritz Todt. The 14-mile expressway between Frankfurt and Darmstadt, which opened on May 19, 1935, was the first section completed under Hitler. By December 1941, when wartime needs brought construction to a halt, Germany had completed 2,400 miles (3,860 km), with another 1,550 miles (2,500 km) under construction."

Article link: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/reichs.cfm

Reply on news.ycombinator.com