Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

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A few years ago I had a team that worked on software for this - it was far more complicated than expected. The hardware, IE: trucks with paint equipment, are also far more complicated as you've got to get the application of paint just right or else it leads to too little (and thus repeat applications) or too much (which over the miles becomes big $$$). Also, it's not always just paint - it can have reflective material and binders with various kinds of textures added as well.

edit: For what it's worth, my impression at the time is that this is an industry ripe for disruption. Every city / state / county has to deal with road striping. They do it through a combination of their own rigging and/or various firms who specialize in this stuff - both hardware and software - but where there isn't a dominate provider. It's classic B-school stuff: take a cottage industry and standardize the process, outperform your competitors because of your standardization, and become the monopoly.

> it was far more complicated than expected

I ran into this myself being involved in a highway project along the Oregon coast. There was a very fine balance of paint reflectivity, traction, and wear resilience that had to be met and it turned out it was very, very trick to hit the right spot.

E.G., the paint itself has very poor traction characteristics when wet, which it often is on the pacific coast. Adding texture coatings to it then impacts the reflectivity, but reflective additives within the texturizer cause it to wear faster..

We were only paving 4 miles, but I saw several inspectors grow a lot of gray hair over the course of a few months.

Given that geography, there's a strong likelihood that you used the software my team developed (sorry?).

Not me personally, I was on a different aspect of the work than the striping, but did I ever get to hear about it.

I spent some time in Germany and something that struck me was the omnipresence of the Unimog. It seemed like for every outdoor job that can exist, there is an attachment you can bolt onto the front of a unimog to do it. Utility trucks are relatively highly customized in the states compared to that.

Its a hybrid of a truck and farm tractor. The track width was standardized to the width of two rows of planted potatos. It was instrumental in the German rebuilding effort after WW2 so it sort of became a national point of pride, the vehicle that rebuilt Germany.

As to why the hybrid idea never made it to the USA is the USA did not suffer continuous allied bombings and therefor had no need to develop a multipurpose vehicle. The Unimog replaced two vehicles thus being very convenient and cost effective in post war Germany. A single vehicle could till fields, haul crops, haul building materials, and plow snow. USA had all of those things already. Why reinvent the wheel?

I knew a guy through a friend who worked for the county painting streets.

He is long gone, so I can tell this story.

He stole a bunch of paint they used for street markings, and painted his house. Supposedly it would light up at night when cars went by.

I never saw the house at night though myself.

> my impression at the time is that this is an industry ripe for disruption

> outperform your competitors because of your standardization, and become the monopoly

I'm not sure what your goal is here, either it's innovation or creating a monopoly, but you can't really argue for both at the same time.

Monopolies are often created through innovation, either through lowering costs or increasing quality above competitors. Carnegie Steel, for example, used the Bessemer process to drastically lower the cost of steel and thus drive competitors out of business. Google used innovation to make searches much better and faster.

There are certainly other ways to create a monopoly, such as regulatory capture, illegal activities, and price dumping, but natural monopolies due to superior levels of innovation do exist. The reason we generally want to avoid monopolies isn't because of the way they are created, it's because of the damage they can cause after they are firmly established.

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