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Comment by tetris11 | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic read. I'm impressed at how forthcoming various US city officials and employees are about giving away infrastructure plans to anyone who demands it.

Freedom of Information act, sure. But try gaining access to the same level of info that Tyler got here in a country like Germany[0]. In theory very easy, in practice you will be sent in a vicious circle of disinterested officials passing the buck.

0: https://www.dpma.de/english/our_office/law/freedom_of_inform...

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In my experience these city officials are almost overjoyed that someone is even asking the question.

They have little community meetings when talking about developments and road/bike changes and almost nobody attends them unless there is a big controversy.

I actually enjoyed it and got undivided attention from multiple planners and left feeling they knew a lot more about it than I did and had though of lots of the concerns you could bring up.

I've had the same experience. I once noticed that a section of local highway had been restriped so instead of it being just white dashes it had white dashes followed immediately by a brief black dash. This is a fairly light colored concrete highway that runs east-west.

I was curious about this new striping, emailed, and very quickly got an interesting and friendly response about how they are studying this new striping technique because it makes the lines more visible. Being light colored pavement, running east-west (facing sunrise/sunset), and in an area where it rains frequently (which changes the pavement color) this made a ton of sense.

I think that asking a technical question politely was a big help, but the folks who replied seemed more like talking with a fellow engineer who was excited to explain why they are doing what they are doing.

(I've had other similar experiences when asking questions about / suggesting light timing changes, etc.)

I’ve been listening to City Planner Plays on YouTube as he plays City Skylines and he has quite interesting patter about the behind the scenes work for development. Many interesting things come up you might not even realize.

I was just driving through a construcion zone, heading east at about 9:00AM so the sun angle was still pretty low. The lanes had been rerouted several times, and the old markings were ground off but this still left lighter stripes in the concrete where the paint had been. In that lighting it was very difficult to distinguish the currently-painted lanes and the old, now ground-off lane markings. As I made my way through, I found myself wondering how a self-driving car would cope.

A self-driving car has many more sensors dedicated to driving than your own body. Of course, the power is in the brain that processes that data.

The community meetings are an extremely bad idea with no benefit. Basically, planners are embarrassed about Robert Moses doing too much to NYC, so now whenever they have an idea they feel obligated to have a meeting where only people who want to stop it show up.

In LA when Metro doesn't really want to do some transit project they've announced, they just spend all the money on community meetings until it runs out.

I was pleasantly impressed too! I've always had good luck getting replies from officials, but I got particularly good responses from the folks named in the article.

Glad you enjoyed it!

I imagine even in Germany the officials would enjoy dealing with a kind person expressing enthusiasm about some obscure records and is willing to put in work themselves. It's not like US public employees are famed for not passing the buck.

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