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We can't even bloody keep the yellow markings on the road visible, and "paint" is a technology we've had for thousands of years. Where in dog's name is the mone
by semi-extrinsic 7y ago
We can't even bloody keep the yellow markings on the road visible, and "paint" is a technology we've had for thousands of years. Where in dog's name is the money for installing and maintaining all that smart infrastructure going to come from?
- shoulderfake 7y agoPerhaps take 10% of the military budget and you might just have some $ for that
- SECProto 7y agoPaint is a wear item, the example of beacons would not be a wear item. If original commenter is correct that infrastructure meets halfway, I wouldn't expect self driving cars transition to happen fast at all - maybe on highways first, and busy city streets, later secondary roads. But that kind of thing would result in a decades long transition, and I would estimate it as never being fully autonomous (if beacons die, car would need manual intervention)
- ethbro 7y agoThe primary deployment potential for self-driving cars is long haul freight, which could be done exclusively via the interstate system. If we're going to beacon up a road, they easily make the most sense.
- kazen44 7y agothis might be true for the US, but in many parts of europe, roads are far more crowded. not to mention this doesn't solve the last mile problem.
- maxsilver 7y ago> which could be done exclusively via the interstate system. The interstate system already has working self-driving, even without any beacons. Inherently-safe roads like interstate freeways are already almost solved, and you can already buy a Chevrolet today that can self-drive the interstate system 99% of the time. It's all the dangerous roads that need the help. The ones with bicyclists and pedestrians and parked cars and uncontrolled access and such.
- semi-extrinsic 7y agoIf there is one thing we can be sure of, looking at the past couple decades of wireless tech, it's that there will be a profusion of mutually incompatible standards, each spanning multiple HW generations. It may not experience the same physical wear, but it will be an expensive maintenance issue nonetheless.
- SECProto 7y agoDefinitely. If it was clear that external beacons were necessary, you would have the Tesla beacons, you'd have the European manufacturer associated beacons, you'd have the Japanese manufacturers associated beacons... installed at manufacturer's cost (or as a partnership), leading to duplication some places, total absence in others, and exclusivity in the rest. And the EU would do better than the rest of the world, having cars with different receivers (manufactured only for the EU market, of course)
- Fomite 7y ago"Paint is a wear item, the example of beacons would not be a wear item" I am extremely skeptical that beacons, sitting out in the heat, and the sun, and the cold, and the rain, and exposed to whatever we use to maintain roads at that juncture, will not be "a wear item".
- SECProto 7y agoSure, but in the sense that road signs or traffic lights are a wear item. They wouldn't be exposed to the real causes of damage to roads (at least in my area) - transport trucks and road plows. They would need to be replaced at 5-30 year intervals, rather than 4-12 month intervals.
- dodobirdlord 7y agoTraffic lights seem to have a pretty long lifespan.
- thrower123 7y agoThey'll get hit and sheared off by plows and over-size loads, or just by drunks or idiots still driving dumb cars. I do not think people have a solid grasp of how many millions of miles of road would need to be technified for self-driving cars to be widely viable. Most likely, it's going to be a niche thing, tightly restricted to certain places that can afford to build and maintain the infrastructure.
- mopsi 7y agoDon't know about the US, but most roads in Europe already have coded reflectors to aid identification of lane geometry. Roadside reflectors have become a standard feature even on small rural roads, they're just hollow plastic half-tubes with reflecting strips on them. Cheap to install, cheap to maintain. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=road+reflectors&t=ffab&ia=images&iax=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=road+reflectors&t=ffab&ia=images&i...
- rixed 7y agoI, for one, already fail to grasp where we manage to get the funds required to clear and level the land and butter a fresh layer of asphalt on top of it regularly enough to build and maintain that many roads to begin with.
- Anarch157a 7y agoAll it takes is a little bit of rain and hundreds of traffic lights go haywire in my city. What makes you think those beacons would fare any better? Politicians don't a crap for long term maintanance of little visibility infrastructure like that, so they're poorly funded. And you say "private contactors will save the day", please, stop drinking the Ayn Rand Cool-aid.
- SECProto 7y agoWhat is wrong with the traffic lights in your city would be the much more interesting question here. Everywhere I know, traffic lights work as long as their power supply is intact
- Anarch157a 7y agoShitty maintenance on top of lower bidder supplying sub-par equipment because half of the money went to corruption. The result is water getting in the circuits and shorting them out.
- SECProto 7y agoAlright. I work with roads and traffic infrastructure, and have never seen that situation before. The active equipment (in my experience) is all stored in above ground cabinets - just simple grey metal cabinets, elevated on foundations or poles, sealed with a gasket but with vent holes to prevent heat buildup. It would take almost deliberate misconstruction to cause a short.
- beerandt 7y agoPavement is a wear item.
- SECProto 7y agoYes, the top lift of pavement is a wear item in the decade time frame. Paint is a wear item in the sub-one year time frame (where I live, with low-VOC paint and frequent winter plowing) Curbs, signage, lights, poles, drainage infrastructure, lower lifts of asphalt and granular material, ...are all non-wear items. This doesn't mean they never need to be repaired, but rather that they tend to get replaced after unintentional damage. Off-surface beacons (what the original comment suggested) would be in this category.
- zamfi 7y agoThe counter-example to this is train tracks. (There are minimum standards for roads, too.)
- rkagerer 7y agoSelf driving trains would probably be easier. Aren't there already some airport shuttle trains and metro transit that's fully automated? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_systems https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_syst...
- bpye 7y agoSkyTrain in Vancouver, BC for example is fully automated. It works well unless there are issues with track or sensors, at which point it has to be driven manually.
- actf 7y agoThe SkyTrain is a great example of how easily transportation technology infrastructure fails during even slightly unexpected circumstances. The trains were inoperable for multiple times this past week, for hours at a time due to snow storms. Trains aren't exactly new technology, yet here we are with them still not functioning properly during what was actually a pretty routine snow storm. It doesn't leave me very optimistic for self driving cars, which will be significantly more compliced technology.
- rkagerer 7y agoI agree with your point, although I don't think "slightly unexpected" is fair in this case. For non-locals, Vancouver and the region was hit with pretty heavy snowfall, ice and wind that week. Sources Footage of conditions in the city: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek8dN9AoGbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek8dN9AoGbo Hydro woes and 150km/h winds in the region: https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/snow-day-highway-alerts-transit-delays-and-schools-closed-in-metro-vancouver https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/snow-day-highway-al... Transit status snapshot: https://www.vancourier.com/news/metro-vancouver-snow-results-in-commuter-chaos-travel-advisories-1.24053223 https://www.vancourier.com/news/metro-vancouver-snow-results... School closures, Blizzard warning: https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/snow-day-highway-alerts-transit-delays-and-schools-closed-in-metro-vancouver https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/snow-day-highway-al... Interviews about the ice buildup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWgx99k585s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWgx99k585s Finally, a bit of fun; how Canadians deal with weather: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/video-shows-people-skiing-snowboarding-on-the-streets-of-east-vancouver-1.4765309 https://bc.ctvnews.ca/video-shows-people-skiing-snowboarding...
- sverhagen 7y agoTo give access to a very lucrative business endeavor? Someone would come up with the investment. We put a nice canape of cell towers too, or wired up every home for internet, after doing it for cable TV, after doing it for electricity. No one really frowns much at those economics anymore (in big parts of the world at least).
- ethbro 7y agoAll of these provided access to new technologies. Autonomous driving is a marginal improvement on an already deployed technology.
- Reason077 7y agoIt’s hardly a marginal improvement. If FSD were to become a reality, it would offer incredible benefits to economic productivity, safety, and quality of life.
- crdoconnor 7y agoIt's also a business endeavour that's done a lot of bragging about the number of people it will render jobless. It's not going to be an easy political sell to erect lots of additional road furniture unless it's cheap and unobtrusive.
- Sharlin 7y agoPrivatized roads?
- Reason077 7y agoThose who think FSD can be solved by building special road infrastructure for self driving cars misunderstand the problem. Cars are already equipped with suites of sensors giving them far more complete information than any human can process. Cars can already react faster and hold lanes with more precision than humans can. What’s lacking is general intelligence. The ability to creatively respond to unexpected situations, even when it’s something you’ve never seen before.
- 7y ago
- tapland 7y agoDoes it have to be visible? Couldn't it be tokens transmitting their location with great accuracy? 0 visibility in snow happens often.
- tachyonbeam 7y agoI don't see why not. We have centimeter-level GPS. It's true you maybe can't always rely on GPS signal being there, but you could also install devices on traffic lights that would allow cars to precisely locate themselves at intersections, so they stop at the correct position, etc. What I think is that self-driving cars may also force us to confront ways in which real-world driving environments are inadequate, so that we can make them more adequate. For example, there are intersections where stop signs (or other signs) are present but not visible. Humans know they have to stop there, so they stop anyway. Self-driving cars could systematically find and report these locations, and might get the city to do something about them.
- 14 7y agoI also picture the moment a lot of cube satellites are above broadcasting internet across the globe 24hrs a day combined with millimeter gps combined with 5g cellular technology we could do a reasonable job of driving cars anywhere.
- shagie 7y agoThe Advanced Snow Plow system that Caltrans used as a test on Interstate 80 near Donner Summit had four miles with embedded magnets. This cost about $25,000/mile in '98. The full description of the system can be read at https://path.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/advanced_snowplow_development_and_demonstration_phase_i_driver_assistance.pdf https://path.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/advanced_snowp... Alaska uses GPS for their precision plowing - https://www.truckinginfo.com/329914/how-alaska-dot-uses-gps-for-precision-plowing https://www.truckinginfo.com/329914/how-alaska-dot-uses-gps-... . Note that to get the 2" precision you need high quality GPS receivers. > The trucks have two GPS receivers mounted atop the cab. These receivers cost about $10,000 each, Shankwitz says. "That's probably why this hasn't been deployed in many other areas; it's just too expensive and most applications do not require that level of accuracy." > The two-centimeter accuracy actually comes from a third receiver -- a high-precision, stationary ground-based receiver perched atop a microwave communications tower in nearby Valdez. It's accurate to within millimeters and it acts as reference receiver for the plow-mounted systems. I don't see this being standard on self driving cars. That said, ground penetrating radar is being looked at and appears to be a lower price point. https://phys.org/news/2016-06-vehicles-high-precision-adverse-weather.html https://phys.org/news/2016-06-vehicles-high-precision-advers...
- amelius 7y agoWe'd have self-driving road marker printers to keep the paint from becoming invisible ;)
- samstave 7y agoThe Road Roomba 9000!
- notatoad 7y agoDo self-driving cars even need road markings? IIRC Google's self-driving car project started out ignoring road markings entirely, and relied on a centimetre-precision map of the test city instead. That obviously has downsides too, but unreliable road markings would be a pretty silly blocker to ever having a self-driving car. that's a solveable short-term problem.
- Rhinobird 7y agoall fun and games until some jack-ass spoofs the GPS and moves a road 20 feet to the left. https://www.wired.com/2012/07/drone-hijacking/ https://www.wired.com/2012/07/drone-hijacking/
- mavhc 7y agoThat's the point though, the Waymo car doesn't rely on gps, it's has HD maps on board. Plus is has dead reckoning because it's touching the ground, so it knows where it's moving.
- tripa 7y agoNot sure I get your point. Having atom-resolution maps doesn't help a bit it you don't know where on it you are.
- bpye 7y agoI think the idea is that with a good idea of where you're starting, either by GPS or some other waypoints, you can avoid the need for GPS through dead reckoning and updating based on other known features. At least, that's my guess.
- martyvis 7y agoIf you have high res images available of the vicinity ( and constantly update them ) you can work out where you are.
- tasty_freeze 7y ago
- nexuist 7y agoSame as usual for the past few decades: private capital that funds existing and upcoming startups, who will deploy proprietary smart infrastructure and allow users to connect to it probably through some monthly subscription service.
- einrealist 7y agoI am more fearful of trolls, tricking the technology. I doubt, that the software / hardware will have a common sense, like we humans have. Its this common sense that keeps us alive in unexpected scenarios, like when the paint on the road is missing.
- bpfrh 7y agoI would argue that signing beacon messages with a PKI infrastructure would migate that issue.
- jethro_tell 7y agoAlso, a stake in the ground on the edge of the road that says, I'm 15 feet to the right of the center lane will probably pay for itself in a couple years of stripping. You put two in the ground that say, I'm 15 feet to the right of the centerline and 35 feet from the next beacon and you never have to paint a centerline there again.
- stevehawk 7y agoBut all you've done is swapped one thing that will be poorly maintained for one thing that's already poorly maintained.
- jethro_tell 7y ago*with a much longer life. Stripping needs to be done every year to stay fresh. You can put a beacon in the ground and I should be able to be there and working 10 years later.
- 0xEFF 7y agoWho is the signing authority? China? The United States? Russia?
- dodobirdlord 7y ago
- eddieplan9 7y agoI expect private companies will be the ones providing the infrastructure for self driving cars, and your car will have to subscribe to a "awareness service provider", much the same way that your phone needs to subscribe to a carrier.
- AngryData 7y agoIf it is on asphalt roads you can easily embed wires and electronics underneath the surface by heating it up. And an embedded wire would be both easy for a computer to track and easy to fix or replace.
- close04 7y agoWe may actually discover it’s cheaper or smarter to limit the scope of what self driving cars have to do by limiting their infrastructure. If cities become more pedestrian (cyclist, public transport) centric then some of the issues disappear. It would be a hell of a lot easier if you eliminate the complexities of navigating city traffic if most of it is gone or car traffic is completely separated from the rest. Either via a reduced number of tunnels, suspended roadway, or simply by reducing the number of places where cars and pedestrians cross paths. Between vastly reducing car traffic and separating it from pedestrians the problem of fully self driving is greatly simplified (probably not eliminated).
- l33tman 7y agoWhich proves the point the volkswagen guy was trying to make I guess.
- nradov 7y agoWhere will existing cities find the budget and physical space for separating transportation modes?
- close04 7y agoIf you do it in the correct order, first massively reducing car traffic and then separating it, the costs should be manageable over time. The point isn’t to do it all at once or overnight. This has the “side” effect of making cities a lot more human friendly even before doing anything to separate traffic while still reducing the complexity of navigating the city FSD.
- supertrope 7y agoRe-purposing one of the existing lanes (a bus lane can move more people than 3 SOV lanes combined). Toll roads, reinvesting parking revenue, and increased tax revenue from downtown land used for working, living, and playing instead of just storing automobiles.
- jlevers 7y agoThis doesn't answer your question about money, but with (mostly) human drivers on the road there isn't much incentive to keep the lines visible, because humans are excellent at inferring where the lines should be, even if they're not there.
- 93po 7y agoIt seems to me 99.99% of all road markings are perfectly visible
- gugagore 7y agoAssuming you're right in that estimate, the hard work is getting more 9s. As a total kind of spitball number, you want 4 more of them.
- Marsymars 7y agoI'm incredulous that that can be the case anywhere. I live in a wealthy jurisdiction, and the road markings here largely are not what I'd consider to be "perfectly visible". I'd guess that currently, probably 3/4 of painted lane markings have one or more of the following issues: a) obscured by snow/ice, b) faded c) road under construction and lane markings don't correspond to current lanes.
- mdtusz 7y agoIf you ever visit a city that gets substantial snowfall, road markings are essentially nonexistent, even when the snow and ice melts in the spring.
- beerandt 7y agoThis just goes to show how even unperceptive humans are better than the most perceptive car logic. Where the car would freak out and stop, you don't even notice anything is missing.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- scoot 7y agoIf you're going to try to swear like a 60's Brit, at least get you bloody grammar right. ;-) <strikethrough> "bloody" is an adjective, not an adverb, so </strikethrough>: "We can't even keep the bloody yellow markings on the road visible"
- clouddrover 7y agoIt's bloody well both: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bloody https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bloody
- scoot 7y agoHmm, you're absolutely right! (And the dictionary I consulted is as wrong as I was.) So why does the post I was replying to not work as is?
- clouddrover 7y agoIt does bloody work as is. People bloody say "bloody verb" all the bloody time. Here's a bloody example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGWhjojt5dw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGWhjojt5dw
- antonvs 7y agoProbably just because you're not familiar with the usage.
- Doctor_Fegg 7y agoThe "even" both breaks up the flow and makes the "bloody" unnecessary - i.e. you've already said "even", you don't need to say "bloody" too. So although there's nothing grammatically wrong with the sentence, it reads awkwardly. A native British English speaker would be more likely to use your suggestion. It's just one of those barely documented curiosities like adjective order (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...).
- sydd 7y agoit won't happen overnight everywhere. there are other transportation methods that require lots of infrastructure to maintain, e.g. trams, subways where the need is big enough to worth it. I guess we will see the same with roads, busy avenues will be smart, and small country roads will require manual driving.
- chiefalchemist 7y agoIn dense urban and suburban areas that's likely not an issue. Another possibility is Automaker X partnering with comms / infrastructure Company Y (e.g., Comcast). Put another way, if they can get to the point this is the dealbreaker then it's easy compared to what it took to get here.
- kalleboo 7y agoThe money is going to come from ads and VCs
- naravara 7y agoYeah. For the cost of all this retrofitting of roads, you’d be able to build the most insanely comprehensive transit system anyone has ever heard of. FWIW though, it probably is possible to use this sort of technology for buses and shuttles. You can’t fix markings on ALL the roads, but you can make sure the markings are good enough on main arterials to have a dedicated bus lane.
- supertrope 7y agoA lot of tech solutions to transportation problems are reinventing elements of mass transit. Self-driving trucks that are virtually linked like a train. Telling Uber pool rides to walk to the nearest intersection to optimize routes (like a bus stop). Central scheduling to share right of way timeslots between vehicles. Or tech fails to reinvent the wheel, e.g. assuming that the congestion and parking issues caused by too many single occupancy vehicles can be solved with software instead of dynamic road and parking pricing and high occupancy vehicles.
- naravara 7y ago>A lot of tech solutions to transportation problems are reinventing elements of mass transit. For sure. And I feel like they're going about it backwards by defaulting to maintaining norms of private property and leasing things starting with private/personally owned property and developing ways to lease it to for communal use. They'd probably have a more viable business model if they had started with communal property and charged rent or usage fees for maintenance instead. Jitney cabs or dollar vans have been around forever, and their big challenge was figuring out how to do dispatch and routing in a way that didn't give people intolerably long wait times.
- wozniacki 7y agoFor the love of everything holy, some of us just dont want public transit - especially having seen the horrors of most public transit options even in the best managed nations and conditions. From one of my previous comments on a different post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19638171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19638171 - - - - Reducing the number of cars (and therefore traffic) on the roads will benefit everybody You seem to have a rose-tinted view of the world we live in. Have you ever had to commute in less-than-ideal conditions? Heavy snow? Sleet? Black ice? Have you ever lived in places that are not perfectly flat? or lived in places that are hot that make bicycling unfeasible? Did you have sporting gear / work gear that you had to lug? Did you know some people have to fetch their own gear to work Did you have to take calls during transit? Did you know its common practice for employees to call into meetings during their commute and/or help assist operations via conference calls? Have you had to shop for more than a baguette or a bagel at a store? You know how cumbersome that gets for even a family of three? Do you have the slightest clue how much casual violence and crime happen on public transit?[1] Not to belabor the point but there simply are dozens of cases where bicycles or public transit just don't cut it. Not to mention the hygiene, personal safety (from other passengers for example) and personal space aspects involved in someone choosing a mode of transportation other than public transit or bicycling. Ride-sharing, autonomous vehicles and emission-free vehicles should all alleviate the issues we currently face with traffic, parking and accidents. However doing away with cars or vehicular traffic is just pollyannaish madness. [1] Teen robbed at gunpoint at Fruitvale, BART officer says writing a report is a 'waste of resources' https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/bart-police-refuse-report-video-phone-call-oakland-13760013.php https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/bart-police-refuse-repo... - - - - edit: formatting
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Animats 7y agoVolvo has proposed some rather simple infrastructure - driving magnetized nails into the pavement as a lane hint. This is mostly because they have to deal with heavy snow. It's not the sole, or even the primary guidance system, but it helps. They also suggest that snowplows could use the magnets for guidance. In snowy areas, it's common to use posts or flags or even overhead signs (in Hokkaido) to show where the road is.
- WalterBright 7y agoIt's a cool idea, but nails rust, meaning a maintenance issue and outages. Is there a magnetic material that doesn't corrode?
- samstave 7y agoHow about magnetic hematite mixed into the road building materials; especially as its a biproduct of iron mining...
- dredmorbius 7y agoThe signal doesn't have to be strong, only detectable. The nails aren't structural, only a signal. Multiple nails mean the signal is highly redundant, depending on density. Regular maintenance could detect weakening signal (rusting nails) and result in new nails being inserted. Iron oxide remains (weakly) magnetic. Treatments (galvanised nails, coated, etc.) could slow corrosion.
- Fnoord 7y agoGood point, such an issue could/would become obvious during a multi year trial.
- SECProto 7y agoPossibly something between lifts of asphalt would work. But a nail through the surface layer of asphalt would allow water in, and mess with the structural integrity of the wear surface. Also, the water it allowed in would freeze and expand and likely push the "nail" upwards - leading to punctured tires. I'd be curious to read a bit more if you have a link. The overhead lane markers in Hokkaido work well, but would be an expensive retrofit elsewhere (not the poles themselves, but the foundations)
- nostrademons 7y agoThe impetus will be wartime, just as the impetus for the interstate highway system and most of the railway system was wartime. In peacetime, self-driving cars are a nice-to-have that can save many billions of driver hours and a few traffic fatalities. In wartime, they're literally a matter of life or death. The side that can handle all of their logistics without exposing their precious humans to enemy fire has a huge advantage over the one whose supply lanes can get picked off one by one.
- RayVR 7y agoThis argument is tough to swallow. The real push to build interstate highways was in early 1950s and began in earnest in 1956. National defense was only one piece of the justification for the project.
- nostrademons 7y agoThe origins of the interstate highway system in defense is well-documented in the historical record, and the title of the bill authorizing it was the "National Interstate and Defense Highways Act": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aid_Highway_Act_of_1956 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aid_Highway_Act_of_195... There were of course other civilian concerns as well, but Eisenhower's arguments at the time of the plan primarily cited the importance of Germany's autobahn system during WW2 as a justification.
- blub 7y agoDropping bombs on smart highways seems much easier than hitting a moving vehicle.
- nostrademons 7y agoRelatively futile, though, when a self-driving cement mixer comes along, patches the crater, and restores any guidechips needed for other vehicles to navigate.
- 7y ago
- fsloth 7y agoActually, if all we factor in is paint then if we would have autonomous vehicles for which 'paint' was critical there would be a higher frequency in the maintenance cycle using automated robot painters. I'm fairly sure if the highways facilitated 100% autonomous operation their maintenance could be automated thus driving down the costs. But you are right, road maintenance is never cheap. It would probably be easier to have a swarm like national airtraffic AI, all cars flying, all cargo in blimps than to maintain a complex ground network of "smart roads"
- tibbydudeza 7y agoNever mind that money for basic road maintenance is diverted because people want to pay less tax/rates and vote for politicians who promise this bugger the long term effect.
- CamperBob2 7y agoIf subsurface radar imaging tech works out, it will fix the marking/signage problem nicely. Kind of disappointing not to hear more about that since the initial articles came out a couple of years ago.
- IshKebab 7y agoWe can on motorways, which is where I think driverless technology will actually start - motorways are simpler environments than most roads, and have convenient service stations along them. Driverless lorries that go from one service station to another will be the first fully autonomous vehicles I think.
- wozniacki 7y agoThat's a tragedy of priorities. Priorities of the local municipality or even the federal government. A dysfunction of misplaced deliberations. All the road and infrastructure taxes being funneled by the politicians to, other areas as they see fit to placate their constituencies or finance their pet projects. Same with out-of-control grossly over-budget projects that dont deliver the bang for the buck. If we - as an electorate - insisted on superior paint or "marking technology" for surface roads, we shall have them in one form or the other.
- tripzilch 7y agoProbably in those places in the world where "we" can keep the markings on the road visible and the roads properly maintained?
- growlist 7y agoDon't get me started on the potholes. There are some traffic lights near me which need patching every month or two in the winter. Can they not just engineer it to lift in a new concrete slab each time?