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How good are American roads?

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252 points chmaynard | 5 comments | 20 Nov 24 14:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.746s | source
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kube-system ◴[20 Nov 24 15:42 UTC] No.42194893[source]▶
> Interestingly, I expected cold places to have lower road quality in general due to things like freeze-thaw cycles and the impact of road salting, but there doesn’t seem to be much correlation. Plenty of cold places (North Dakota, Wyoming, Minnesota) have good-quality roads

Not sure about those states in particular, but I have anecdotally noticed that some of the places with the harshest winters do some of the least road salting -- because salt is mostly usable for light to moderate snowfall and the people who live in the harshest climates are often better equipped to drive on hard packed snow.

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softfalcon ◴[20 Nov 24 15:47 UTC] No.42194966[source]▶
This is somewhat true where I’m at in Canada. In the city, half the people have proper winter tires, the other half “wing it” with whatever they can afford/put-up-with.

Regularly see accidents all winter long from goofs sliding straight across multiple lanes of traffic or going off into the ditch. Only some of us are prepared.

We don’t salt, only drop sand grit and gravel sparingly. Our roads become ice rinks or snow piles for a decent portion of the winter.

Your comment about us being “better equipped” made me chuckle as I spent this morning watching my neighbours play slip-and-slide in the cul-de-sac cause they opted to not put their winter tires on.

As someone who grew up in the mountains, their behaviour is downright dangerous in my opinion.

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kube-system ◴[20 Nov 24 15:50 UTC] No.42194996[source]▶
> opted to not put their winter tires on.

Heh. At least they have them, and/or know what they are. I have been met with "they make tires just for snow?" when talking about snow tires in the US before.

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softfalcon ◴[20 Nov 24 15:57 UTC] No.42195094[source]▶
Hah! Yup! Heard that one before from Californians, Texans, New Yorkers, and Arizonans in my travels.

Ignorance can be the death of ya! Thank goodness most of them aren’t trying to drive up here!

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eep_social ◴[20 Nov 24 16:51 UTC] No.42195783[source]▶
CA, TX, AZ yeah, yeah, yeah but hang on.. New Yorkers!? I hope these are the ones who live in NYC without a car.. otherwise that’s completely insane. Upstate NY gets tons of snow. Buffalo famously so.
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SoftTalker ◴[20 Nov 24 17:43 UTC] No.42196376[source]▶
The average driver today knows shockingly little about their car. It's an appliance. They put gas in it, take it to the dealer for service when the message comes up saying service is due, and that's about it. Checking tire pressures, tread wear, brake wear, oil and other fluid levels, or opening the hood for any reason is not something they ever think about.

They make their payments and trade when the warranty expires. It's an appliance.

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dgfitz ◴[20 Nov 24 17:54 UTC] No.42196486[source]▶
That's amusing to me. My spouse and I fix all our appliances, cars included.
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vel0city ◴[20 Nov 24 18:52 UTC] No.42196989[source]▶
Yeah that there, that's getting to be incredibly uncommon.

And it's not hard to see why.

I had a GE washing machine start misbehaving one day. It would fill the tub, do a few spins to try and balance the load, start to spin up for a few minutes, stop. Try and balance the load, spin for a few minutes, stop. Then eventually just give up, without even draining the tub before unlocking the door.

Me knowing appliances pretty well, I already had the knowledge the service manual is probably tucked away inside the shell. Strike one going against most normal people, they wouldn't know to do that. Open that up, see how to get into the diagnostic menu and translate the error codes and run some tests.

Ok, so now I know it's a speed sensing issue. The speed the motor is reporting and the speed the tub speed sensor isn't making sense for the fixed gear ratio so it thinks there's something unsafe going on. That's a decent safety issue, but looking at the tub as it spins it's probably just a sensor issue.

The tub hall effect sensor was like $20 shipped from the GE parts website. Quick and easy to swap out. No dice, still not wanting to spin up. More reading online, it's likely the main motor inverter board. Well, that's pretty deep in the machine, could also be the motor assembly itself which would be covered under warranty, let me call a GE service guy to come.

Service guy comes, he plugs some wireless adapter into a hidden USB port, fumbles with it for a few minutes with an iPad with a shattered screen, gives up diagnosing the issue. Writes up an invoice proposal for $900 worth of parts and labor for him to swap out a ton of things, or a referral code/discount coupon for me to buy a new unit.

I decline the order. Surely not all this shit is wrong with the thing. I find the inverter board online from a third party site for <$100, was available from the official parts site for not much more. Start unplugging it a bunch, and notice the motor hall sensor pin wasn't seated very well. I don't want to put it all together again just to find reseating/gluing the connection together didn't solve the problem, so I just put the new inverter board in. Put it all back together and it's just fine for <$100.

I imagine it was just a loose connection for that sensor. This is probably still a perfectly functional board on my shelf. I'll keep it and the other sensor in case some other issues happens in the future. But it could have been just a loose connection that sent this nearly $1000 unit to the scrapyard if it wasn't for me bothering to look. It could have been an exceptionally cheap part. And the final fix I accepted was just somewhat cheap part.

In the end people generally don't care to actually fix shit, and I imagine the majority of people would have just thrown up their hands before looking for the service manual, called the tech, he would have made it obvious a new unit would be a better deal, and they would have taken it.

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1. keybored ◴[20 Nov 24 22:08 UTC] No.42198623[source]▶
> In the end people generally don't care to actually fix shit, and I imagine the majority of people would have just thrown up their hands before looking for the service manual, called the tech, he would have made it obvious a new unit would be a better deal, and they would have taken it.

Is that the conclusion to this whole story?

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2. vel0city ◴[20 Nov 24 22:29 UTC] No.42198796[source]▶
Sure, pretty much. A hired tech didn't bother understanding the deeper issue would prefer me to use his coupon code to buy a new unit of great cost to me. Chances are a simple reseating of a connector and additional support would have prevented several hundred pounds of otherwise perfectly fine materials going to a landfill and cost me almost $1,000 for a similar replacement unit.

And if I didn't have enough knowledge and determination past a standard consumer it would have been trash. Sadly most consumers and support techs don't care enough.

3. 542354234235 ◴[22 Nov 24 17:25 UTC] No.42215674[source]▶
I agree. I feel like this story specifically illustrates how much time, labor, and knowledge you need to have to fix a "modern" appliance. Not only basic mechanical and electrical understanding, but having to troubleshoot the combination of circuit board and software problems puts this well out of the realm of most people. I sacrifice features for more repairability in several of my appliances (Speed Queen washer dryer, Dualit toaster, Kitchenaid mixer, etc) but that takes money, and just isn’t a realistic option for all things.

How many hours of labor did he spend testing, researching, retesting, ordering parts, trying something new, etc. all without a working washer? If that is something you enjoy and take pride in, that is one thing. But as a pure utility proposition for most people, it is way more expensive to rip apart complex machines for the possibility of being able to repair them.

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4. keybored ◴[23 Nov 24 17:14 UTC] No.42221991[source]▶
That’s how I read it as well up until the conclusion.
5. vel0city ◴[23 Nov 24 18:43 UTC] No.42222780[source]▶
Outside of some vocabulary that I do agree most random people wouldn't know off-hand (what's a hall sensor? why are there halls in my washing machine?!), most of what I needed to know from this came from the service manual tucked inside the machine. The only knowledge I needed to jump start this repair this was looking up where the first screws were to take off the top cover and the rest of this was mostly covered in this manual.

Getting it into the maintenance mode, getting the error code values, deciphering the hex error codes, running the tests and knowing what the tests meant was all in that service manual.

As far as my own personal time actually working on it, I probably spent a total of three hours. Shipping for the parts were overnight and two days. However, I did spend four days waiting from the time I scheduled a tech to come out and had that experience, which probably took less than an hour. All in all it was a hair over a week without a functional washing machine.

This was a $900 washing machine that wasn't quite four years old. There was no way I was going to be down to buy yet another washing machine of similar quality and featureset so soon after.

I do agree, this is probably still a bit much to expect a random person to know/do. I'm more just disappointed in service techs who tend to just throw up their hands and offer to sell someone a new appliance instead of spending even a small amount of time looking into it. The guy was supposedly some top GE certified master technician but could barely even understand it or care to look into it. He spent more time putting together an invoice for parts I didn't need than he did looking into it. He didn't bother reading any of the debugging I had done previously which I saw were in his dispatch case notes.

Theoretically the guy knew what model of device he was going to go repair. He already had some diagnostics. He could have had a few spare parts to test with in his truck. This inverter board is the same one used in a lot of appliances, its not like its a one-off part. But instead he was trying to sell me a new front panel, a new main logic board, the same hall sensor I had already replaced and noted in the case notes, the inverter board, a new wiring harness, and I forget what else.