Pothole Damage Costs US Drivers $3B a Year | Hacker News Reader

Pothole Damage Costs US Drivers $3B a Year

quotewizard.com

18 pointsmooreds15 comments

This article ignores one big thing about potholes and that is courts have routinely found that cities have a duty to fix them.

Reporting potholes is key to this. Once a pothole is reporting there's generally a time frame in which the city needs to address it (24-48 hours is common in places I've lived). Should the city not patch it or address the problem in another way they are liable for the damage to your vehicle.

If only Waze let you report potholes. With all those cameras on Cop car's now a days why aren't cop cars just a mobile pothole reporting service? We'd just need to add a gyro and accelerometer which are probably already part of most modern cars to automate this process.

My guess to why this isn't solved is because the cities don't actually have the capacity to fix all the potholes.

Cynically, because there is a lot of incentive for them to hand out tickets to "raise" money. Them automatically reporting potholes would mean that it not costs the city extra money.

> My guess to why this isn't solved is because the cities don't actually have the capacity to fix all the potholes.

Pretty sure this is correct. Nobody wants gas or property taxes to go up. What does get maintained is covered somewhere in the federal budget deficit.

Can you reference some cases about this? I'm assuming it'd be state level courts.

It varies by jurisdiction and comes down to how negligence is determined for road maintenance. If the city was negligent in maintenance of the roads. This is why reporting them is critical because the is only negligent when they know the problem exist and have time to fix it.

There's lots of examples to find.

https://www.coloradolaw.net/blog/sue-a-city-for-pothole-dama...

https://attorneybrianwhite.com/blog/who-is-responsible-for-p...

https://fox8.com/news/pothole-damage-heres-how-to-get-reimbu...

I reported a bunch of potholes near my new house when I moved in. I was very happy when they all were patched up within a couple months... Not 24-48 hours by far, but at least it was addressed.

Where is the money supposed to come from? User fees already don't cover the cost of road maintenance.

Maybe divert a little money away from Israel and other assorted wars and occupations and we could fix our aging infrastructure. Just a thought.

I know anti-Semitism is popular these days, but blaming the Jews for your road’s potholes is a new one.

Not sure how you derive anti-semitism from defunding israel, I have the same opinion of funding going to other countries as well. If a country can't stand on it's own without the US tax serf propping it up then it's a liability not an asset.

Years ago I caught this video about LMU students leveraging machine-learning to find pot holes and other road damage in Los Angeles. I've thought about it many times since and wondered why cities haven't adopted this. There are so many city vehicles roaming the city, that Los Angeles could get a full map of road damage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOHLENkL8oE

Yet the population continues to demand more miles of roads than budgets could conceivably maintain. Framing this as a moral issue doesn't really make sense. If our goal is to fix potholes we can, but the bill for fixing all potholes would mean big changes to priorities and taxation. Whatever other factors may be involved it seems pretty clear that the US is going to be forced into a road diet at least in the short term.

What does $3B of road maintenance look like? Is there a positive ROI on it?

Bangalore (India) municipality: Hold my beer.

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