5 ms·

It is mind-boggling both that such a piece of destroyed public infrastructure can stay in that state for 9 years, and that no kind of safety barrier or even sig

• alistairSH 3y ago
  The part that confuses me is: The North Carolina State Patrol had said the bridge was not maintained by local or state officials, and the original developer’s company had dissolved. So, nobody is maintaining the roads in that neighborhood? It makes very little sense. The roads in my neighborhood are owned and maintained by the neighborhood (not that state or county) and we (the HOA) carry liability insurance.
  • riku_iki 3y ago
    maybe there was no neighborhood, just some abandoned area
  • LeifCarrotson 3y ago
    It's the same as your neighborhood, but without the maintenance being performed. My little 15-unit private drive was a single homeowner's 25-acre plot in 1950. Someone built a house in the back, with a long driveway up to it. Then they sold three lots for others to build nearby, then in the 1970s they sold another dozen lots, including mine. In the 80s they pooled some money together and turned the gravel drive into a paved road, still private, we all just have an easement that allows us to drive on it. Now, 40 years later, that paved road needs repaving to the tune of $90,000, because tree roots are breaking it up and it's delaminating in spots from an inadequate repair job a decade ago. But try convincing 10 retirees with limited funds, and 5 families with small children, to each dig in their pockets and come up with $6,000 for a new driveway. Most people have bigger priorities, which is why there's currently a few nasty potholes on the route Google will suggest for you (the only route to my house). This is even worse, because a bridge like that probably costs a lot more than $90,000, and instead of 14 out of 15 people driving over it every day, most of the neighborhood residents don't need it.
    • amalcon 3y ago
      Being rarely used is an advantage, though. You can solve the safety hazard component of the problem with a few hundred dollars worth of signs and barriers, rather than by actually repairing the thing. The convenience part can then be ignored.
      • NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
        If you do this in a college town or something, have fun replacing those signs and barriers every few weeks, as they are graffitied, vandalized and stolen.
        • alistairSH 3y ago
          Ideally, the concrete jersey barriers are temporary until the bridge is either repaired or dismantled appropriately (with proper road closure on both sides). It still blows my mind that a bridge on an otherwise publicly accessible road was privately owned and maintained. That's a new one to me - around here, there are plenty of private neighborhood roads, but none have bridges.
        • caf 3y ago
          It'd be quite a feat to steal or meaningfully vandalise a concrete crash barrier like this: https://www.jaybro.com.au/pub/media/catalog/product/cache/c2ce29bbfe5e027ff0a0343321477cfb/u/s/used-concrete-barriers.jpg https://www.jaybro.com.au/pub/media/catalog/product/cache/c2... Living with the graffiti seems like a strictly lesser problem than living with a road ending in a missing bridge.
        • quickthrowman 3y ago
          A 10’ long, 32” high jersey barrier weighs 4,000 lbs
        • amalcon 3y ago
          My parents live in a community where one of the roads is named something like "High Street" (not actually that; it's a little road within their development). That sign gets stolen a few times a year by college students from the next town over because it includes the word "high". They have never had a road barrier stolen or meaningfully damaged, though -- they have maybe a dozen in various places. They budget about $50/year to replace the signs. Still much less, even over rather a long period, than the cost of rebuilding a bridge.
  • voxic11 3y ago
    Guessing dissolved companies don't make a great target for lawsuits, even if you win they have nothing to give you. Which is why they are going after google instead.
    • caf 3y ago
      They're going after Google as well. Probably in the hopes that they're all found jointly and severally liable.
  • oooyay 3y ago
    It has never made sense to me that a neighborhood is responsible for paying for a road that people beyond the neighborhood can use. Portland and Multnomah county work this way and as a result, part of our 1950s neighborhood has a gravel road that's become extremely problematic. The economies of scale make it easier for a city or county to maintain machinery for paving roads and making sidewalks, and yet some municipalities force this on residents. In our case, not everyone in my neighborhood make enough to be able to contribute to the construction of a road, much less repaving.
    • bewaretheirs 3y ago
      > The economies of scale make it easier for a city or county to maintain machinery for paving roads and making sidewalks Generally that equipment is useful for more than just paving roads and is owned by private contractors in the US - the same contractors could be hired by county, city, or neighborhood.
      • SoftTalker 3y ago
        It depends. Where I live the city owns a lot of roadbuilding equipment directly, and employs people to operate it. The roads they build are garbage. Uneven, bumpy, rainwater pools on them, etc. Sometimes they have too much work and contract some jobs to private paving contractors. The roads they build are flat, smooth, and drain well.
    • alistairSH 3y ago
      Not claiming this is the best solution, but with a formal HOA there are mandatory annual/quarterly dues, a proper budget for services/maintenance, reserve funds, etc. I'd prefer road maintenance was handled by the state, but the HOA works for maintaining common space and other services not handled by the government (trash collection).
    • michael1999 3y ago
      There are often profound DISeconomies of scale in municipal contracting. Sloth, corruption, feather-bedding, etc. are all chronic problems in cities. If nobody in the neighbourhood can pay for a paved road, then maybe the road should be gravel. Especially a cul-de-sac -- the road exclusively serves the residents. If they won't pay for it, why should anyone else?
  • eitally 3y ago
    This is a big problem in North Carolina, especially in the exurbs surrounding the Triangle (Raleigh / Durham / Chapel Hill / Cary / Apex / Holly Springs / Clayton / Zebulon / etc). Developers have no problem buying land and building new neighborhoods, and even funding the initial road & utility construction/connections, but in a number of cases already (in neighborhoods less than ten years old) there have been issues where infrastructure required expensive repairs or updates and the developer claimed their contracts washed their hands of it, and that the HOAs hold responsibility for maintenance. I sincerely doubt the majority of home buyers in these neighborhoods would have expected to be on the hook to maintain sewer/water & electrical infrastructure, not to mention roads, sidewalks and signage.
• shadowgovt 3y ago
  There's a relatively famous story of a former West Virginia mining town that had the only access bridge collapse, isolating the town via any route except private roads owned by the original mining company (that, due to bad blood via the way the mining town turned from a company town to a public municipality, the mining company refused to let the townsfolk use). Because the bridge crossed the river separating West Virginia and Kentucky, each state (two of the poorest states in the Union) pointed at the other as being responsible for reinstituting the bridge. Neither did so, and the Federal government refrained from intervening. Desparate to see something happen, the de facto mayor (he didn't want the job, but people tend to look for leadership in a crisis) hit upon a stroke of genius. You see, this was all happening... In 1977. The town's mayor wrote a letter for international aid to solve a humanitarian crisis... To the USSR. It took West Virginia like a week to announce their plans to build a new bridge. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/print/Article/2433 https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/print/Article/2433 All this to say: bridges tend to connect two different municipalities because water tends to be a natural administrative and territorial divide, so it is not as surprising as one might think that they can stay down far longer than is efficient. Putting them back up requires two municipalities to agree on the cost structure... Municipalities that, worse than having differing goals, have all the long-memory animosities that build up from being forced-geographic neighbors, so they come to the table with a bag of opposing goals.
  • mcmoor 3y ago
    Sometimes I thought how many rivers in the world become unproductive because they're used as borders so neither party can take advantage of it. Just like if France annex German up to Rhine, I don't think Rhine will be industrial powerhouse like it is but dozens of military outposts.
    • Symbiote 3y ago
      Ummm... The Rhine is the border between France and Germany. Strasbourg seems to be doing fine.