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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

When Elon Musk got the boring company going, I couldn't help wondering why there weren't entreprenuers in paving.

Why don't we have giant computer-controlled machines that go down roads, suck them in and grind them up and spit out new roads behind themselves -- as the defacto paving scenario?

I know they do this sometimes. But why not all the time? Instead of pothole fixing, just fix the entire road. Cheap road machines, drive the price down. And put down lane markings and reflectors as part of the process. And do every thing only at night.

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Because stubbornly asphalt and concrete take time to pour. Plus, there is a significant amount of work just in repairing the subgrade, otherwise the newly-finished road surface will just heave and buckle. And we do have paving entrepreneurs, they open and operate paving companies.

Ok, I'll settle for computer-controlled pothole fillers. Like that putter in caddyshack.

This exists, but it's only good for "cold patch," meaning temporary fixes.

Dumb question: if you reduce the cost of temporary fixes enough, does that become a good permanent strategy?

I'd imagine best practices are currently designed with a large per-issue overhead in mind. Getting men & material to a given location is expensive, so fixes need to last. If you have a robot that doesn't mind finding & resurfacing the same damn pothole every time it rains, would that compete?

At a point, the whole road will sink and break should the bottom layer give. Give it a few winters and it will be a unpassable big crack.

> a few winters

There's the assumption that per-crack overhead is too large to justify frequent visits again.

Gah. Cold patch. That stuff seems to be next to useless, with approximately the same effectiveness as just pouring gravel into the pothole. It just spreads out everywhere.

Overall it is slightly better than filling the hole with gravel, since gravel will tend to abrade the edges of the road surface and make the hole larger. It's still a crappy fix though, the only advantage is it's quick and cheap.

You're supposed to scrape the overflow back into the hole and tamp everything down. If you do it properly it's not as good as real asphalt but it's a hell of a lot better than gravel, or a hole.

Unfortunately where I live the workers are incredibly lazy or incredibly mismanaged. They just dump it and leave it heaping up above the road surface. That degree of shoddiness is a mark of societal dysfunction...

Because nobody wants to be the mayor who replaced 500 high-paying union jobs with five machines.

How about the mayor who fixed the terrible roads?

Voters don't remember which maintenance task was performed last month, but union types don't forget who acted against their interests.

I know it's not acceptable to just jump in there and say " word my brotha". But this may be a reason. No matter how good the tech is , you need guys out there swinging shovels. It's not fun, It's not easy, It's hot and sweaty. It don't pay like FAANG It hurts your body but you won't need to go to a gym after work so you can sleep Digging a ditch for prevailing wage in Calif is around 60 bucks an hour for union wages- even more depending upon the trade. Apprenticeship FTW

Just employ them in the same continuous way, but let them fix more problems.

I'll bet if you asked those guys, they'd rather use a backhoe or a bobcat instead of a shovel. Their bodies will last a lot longer too - I have many older friends who just destroyed their bodies doing crap like that when they were younger.

I think the other problem I haven’t seen mentioned is most city streets have tons of pipes and wires under them. Repaving can be complicated.

There are machines that do that. It still is expensive to replace them by the material costs alone.

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