Model X Crash on US-101 (Mountain View, CA)

[mongo]

Agreed - I saw that, and thought - wow they really boxed the white car in! In the dash cam drivers defense - that white car should have made the decision and got in the lane. They had plenty of space for the change and just hesitated too long it looks like.

Am I looking at the same video? White car was braking early, no signal, the dash cam is centered vs the driver (view more blocked by the SUV). And the white car had plenty of opportunity to move over, instead they hit the brakes more. Dash cam car even slowed for them (compare position of the car to the right that did not brake, dash cam was gaining, then stayed the same relatively). I'd say dash cam and SUV did well in not hitting white or swerving into outher cars. Also, white car could have changed lanes in front of the car in front of the dash cam car, there was no one there.

 

[dgatwood]

While all of your solutions aren't counterproductive by themselves except for the extra signage (which would cause more confusion and distraction, not less), none of them fix the main problem, that the lane was realigned to the right to direct drivers direclty into the gore point (what I've been calling the wall tip). I finally figured out what everyone was saying by "gore" point; maybe I don't watch/play enough violent movies/games, so that wasn't strongly in my vocabulary.

It would be better to remove ALL the signs except one little "^\ 85" sign with the diagonal arrow upleft and realign the lane back where it was supposed to be by the median of the freeway, far left, straight onto the offramp to 85, never directed at all toward the gore point, but well left of it. You can't fix stupid with a bunch of signs; the way to fix stupid is to move the lane back to the way it was supposed to be. The drivers aren't the stupid here; Caltrans and the government are the stupid here for breaking the lanes.

I think that the reason for the change is that the exit now slopes off at the normal angle for an exit ramp, whereas before, it was less steep. I doubt that extending the slope would make much difference in the rate of accidents at that spot, though adding either a double-stripe zone farther back or a series of plastic posts farther back might help by reducing the number of people cutting in at the last second.

Either way, I'm fairly certain that most of these issues are moot. I've recently learned that the person who died was an Apple employee, which makes it very surprising that he would cut suddenly back onto 101, because that's not the way you would get to Apple from there, typically.

I mean, it is remotely possible that there was some major slowdown on 85 that he decided at the last second to try to avoid by going down Mathilda, and it is possible that he normally took some other route and got surprised by the lane closed sign, but it seems much more likely that either autopilot malfunctioned or he had to react to someone else doing something unsafe. In either case, no amount of signage or highway paint would have made any difference, and the only thing that could have saved his life would have been Caltrans resetting the barrier properly.

 

[Ulmo]

Here is a similar barrier on SB880 in Milpitas. It too looks shortened, but has the water drums to help cushion such an impact.

I checked the lane alignments on that interchange. My conclusion: It's pretty bad; it stays too far right then jags left, rather than being a clean straight run into the overpass. I have also driven that many times, and have come to the same conclusion while driving it as I did looking at it now.

Do you see that big gap in the lower left of the screenshot to the left of the lane between the lane and the median before the split where the lane should be? That's an indication of bad lane markings. You see empty space in a lot of bad evil traffic management. The split should happen much earlier, and the left lane should align with the median the whole way.

 

[McRat]

Off topic, but their accent would make it extremely hard for me to be in their company. I wonder if I'd get used to it over time. It's extremely offputting to watch it jarringly in a video all of a sudden, so I suppose that's part of it.

If I understand the story right, it was a US Marine pilot in the F/A-18 with no carrier landings under his belt. Listen to him breathe on final. That buzzer you hear is NO FUEL, he has only 300lb left. And his nose gear is jammed in the retract position. He might not get a second chance. I'm surprised they let him land and risk setting the flight deck on fire. But punching out also pretty dangerous.

Balls-o-steel on that Marine, but calm under pressure.

As far as the 'fix the roads', I see no problem with that road based on videos. If you are blinded by the sun, slow down. If you are confused, slow down. There is no law that says you must drive faster than it is safe for you. In fact, there is a rule that's the opposite. I'm not saying to lock up your brakes, but to give up some velocity when visibility or road markings are poor.

 

[Ulmo]

I did see one Streetview with such a truck there once. It seemed to be to protect workers in the area.

View attachment 289148

I have to assume they don't have enough of those to leave one there other times when barrier is impacted, and no workers are on site.

I just realized what everyone is talking about; the truck has that thing sticking out the back to cushion crashes. That's a great idea to leave there unattended. My opinion is that putting workers in harm's way is a bad idea.

 

[Az_Rael]

Am I looking at the same video?

You are. I would have started slowing down here when brake lights were coming on both to the left AND right of me. I would have preemptively slowed even though I couldn't see what was going down, just in case I had to react to whatever it was.



So I would have had more time to react to this move, at which point I would have really braked, as my spidey sense about the way he was moving would tell me he might be about to come into my lane.



So I would have already been going slower than surrounding traffic and could brake enough to let the dumb dude in (he was making a bonehead move). I have to do that kind of stuff a lot for other dumb drivers around here. Keeps you on your toes. Defensive driving is a sport sometimes.

 

[scaesare]

Interesting idea. Parts of the front suspension ended up in various places, so it is possible it was pushed packward then detached. I'm thinking the motor stayed attached to the front cradle. Based on the damage to the front of the pack, I'd expect the motor to go up and over vs pushing the leading edge in.

I wonder if the inclined front race of the motor assembly would serve to push it downwards into the top front unarmored hump portion of the pack?:

 

[Ulmo]

20171219_134710A - Streamable

I want to assign some blame in that video:

1. Lanes in wrong spot as I repeated many times.
2. White car totally messed up; it should have taken the lane it found itself in, even if it was fooled by awful government lane markers. This is the world we live in, and we must make the best of it. I'm repeating my position in this forum to try to save lives and making driving better, not because I'm unrealistic about what awful squiggly lines they've drawn in the roadways. If you find yourself victim of government medling, don't cause injury to hurt by doing inefficient super dangerous things to counteract it (I'm not discounting the possibility that the most efficient way to handle government is not always clear, but it should be obvious that stopping in a freeway and cutting people off is not ok). At most, that driver needed to go 15 minutes out of their way to get back into the correct freeway for their needs. 101 South drivers that are irrationally afraid of 85 are probably people who hear horror stories of ICE deportations from those West Side freeways.
3. The videocam driver should have also made the best of a bad situation and tried to make room for the bad white driver to cut in. However, the honking was perfect; the videocam driver should have slowed and honked, not kept up speed and honked or slowed and not honked. However, they have to look in rear view mirrors first before slowing. First thing is get on the horn to warn everybody, second thing is look in all directions to figure out if you can slow down and let them in, third thing is make the best of it.

Sometimes giving them room isn't the best thing. I was in the #1 lane on 17 North going past Los Gatos, and I left room for the car ahead of me in the #2 lane to move over in case someone whipped around the onramp from Hwy 9 North onto Hwy 17 North. Well, wouldn't you know it, that happened, and the driver in #2 lane freaked out, thought I was going to pass them, and slowed down. I maintained the space for them to cut over into the #1 lane by slowing down too. The merging car then had to slow down before hitting the slowing down #2 lane car. The car in the #2 lane then slowed down even more causing me to have to continue slowing down! Then the merging car had to stop halfway between the merging lane and #2 lane and almost hit the car in the #2 lane. I was now driving into the median and coming to a stop so that none of them would hit me and had room. The car in the #2 lane still wanted to leave me room to ... and it took me a minute to figure this out ... dodge into the #1 lane behind me. What the hell! No one was hurt, and there was no accident, but you can see how planning ahead can have bad consequences, especially when the #2 lane car driver didn't understand that push come to shove that they were supposed to not yield to the merging car, and caused the situation where they stop in the middle of the freeway rather than keep going as their backup plan. Some drivers are just stupid! That was a small pickup Toyota, pretty typ. If they knew our laws, they'd have just realized they had the right of way, and made better decisions. If they were paying more attention, they could have gotten in front of me like I allowed before the interchange, or been prepared to do so.

IMO it's just a poor design to have two lanes of cars traveling at highway speed in those lanes and having the lane separation so close to the barrier where it's still possible to switch over at that point. In morning or evening rush hour traffic when those lanes are moving along, it's particularly hazardous due to the volume of cars using the lanes. This merging behavior should be anticipated and smart design would do more to prevent. Wonder if anyone objected when this layout was proposed.

I agree.

 

[Robert831]

 

[Ulmo]

If Caltrans built a road with a tight, unsigned, unbarriered curve next to a ravine and people crashed into the ravine, yes I'd blame Caltrans.

I disagree. I used to drive Hwy 17 all the time when it was a tight, unsigned, unbarriered curvy road next to a cliff drop, and I never blamed Caltrans. I blame Caltrans for the excessive construction they've done there that makes it look way too urban. I also don't blame Caltrans for people driving off cliffs on Hwy 1 in Big Sur or by Half Moon Bay. Those are stupid drivers!

But, if Caltrans or anyone put up a big hunk of concrete and put lanes that drive people into it, I blame them all the way to the end of time.

 

[Ulmo]

If I understand the story right, it was a US Marine pilot in the F/A-18 with no carrier landings under his belt. Listen to him breathe on final. That buzzer you hear is NO FUEL, he has only 300lb left. And his nose gear is jammed in the retract position. He might not get a second chance. I'm surprised they let him land and risk setting the flight deck on fire. But punching out also pretty dangerous.

Balls-o-steel on that Marine, but calm under pressure.

Thanks for interpreting. Yes, indeed.

 

[Ulmo]

Unfortunately no camera exists from Foster City to San Jose. Below is the screenshot from QuickMap app. It surprised me they put a lot of cameras between Santa Cruz and Watsonville.

View attachment 289170

I can shed some possible light on those cameras. There's a campaign to chop all the trees down on Hwy 1 so they can stuff more people in low income housing in the poor part of the county so they can move in and take the jobs from the people who already have jobs in the North part of the county, and commute and pollute further to do it. I and a local politician campaigned against that a few decades ago and won, but the last round a few years ago he switched sides and I didn't campaign (I've been busier and didn't follow it this time), and I lost (he won). I bet part of those cameras is to show how bad traffic is as a campaign item. But, the problem with that is that there are designated drivers who intentionally block traffic on that freeway to make it worse than it actually should be, and they're putting too many low income homes down there, which we don't need; they cause more problems than solutions (crime, people who can't afford market rate things, more crime because they can't afford it, people who don't have jobs, pollution, more traffic). While I want to alleviate traffic problems with more roads, I don't approve of their method of chopping down trees to do it. Instead, they should add a lane on the left of hwy 85 where there's enough space for a full lane prettymuch almost the whole distance of 85, expand some of the highways between Watsonville and Gilroy over to Monterey Hwy, and then turn Monterey Hwy into a freeway up to 85, to alleviate Watsonville over the hill traffic using Hwy 17 and Hwy 1.

As for Watsonville people who want to take jobs from people living next door to work in Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz should simply pass a law requiring employers to pay for time spent in commuting at full hourly or proportional salary wages, and that would put an immediate end to preferring long distance employees working in Santa Cruz by employers, who currently would rather save $0.10 per day and hire someone an hour drive away than pay that extra $0.10. I'd be in favor of that being the law in the entire State of California, actually. It would do more to end time wasted, pollution, money wasted, etc., than any other law they have passed this year. It would be a little government alignment in compensation that then lets the market solve the rest of the issues more purely based on market dynamics. It would have to have teeth, but those teeth are easy: allow any employee who fudged their "living" location to, without penalty, prove where they actually lived, and get back pay for all of their commuting, including overtime wages if applicable; lots of people would cash in, and businesses would quickly learn not to fudge the system. They could hand-deliver a random paycheck to the home of the person to prove they live nearby; since they live nearby, hand-delivery would be relatively cheap.

 

[Ulmo]

The biggest problem is bad and stupid driver. Stop insulting the 10000+people that drive by the same spot daily. One fatality out of the millions that have driven by it, is the road the problem? Give me a break

Just because a lot of us are supermen and superwomen who are able to, at the top of our ability, just barely survive that horrible design, doesn't make it not a horrible design. In fact, we've found out here that it gets crashed into far too often.

 

[mongo]

The videocam driver should have also made the best of a bad situation and tried to make room for the bad white driver to cut in. However, the honking was perfect; the videocam driver should have slowed and honked, not kept up speed and honked or slowed and not honked. However, they have to look in rear view mirrors first before slowing. First thing is get on the horn to warn everybody, second thing is look in all directions to figure out if you can slow down and let them in, third thing is make the best of it.

The dash cam car did slow down, compare it to the minivan on the right.
The white was hitting their brakes during most of the entire attempted lane change (and before). It just dumped more speed than the dash cam car did. Given the dealer plates, it may have been a test drive and they hit the wrong pedal. They had room to merge in front of the previous car also.

I disagree. I used to drive Hwy 17 all the time when it was a tight, unsigned, unbarriered curvy road next to a cliff drop, and I never blamed Caltrans.

Sure, but that is an entire road like that (does it predate modern standards?), I was talking about a normal road with an abnormal curve.

 

[Ulmo]

I think that the reason for the change is that the exit now slopes off at the normal angle for an exit ramp, whereas before, it was less steep.

I get what you're saying, but you're referring to an offramp that transitions from the slow lane of a freeway into a low speed side street grid system. What we're talking about is an interchange from a high speed freeway in the fast lane to another higher speed freeway also in the fast lane, so entirely different situation; 101 -> 85 is a freeway interchange at full speed, not a street exit slowdown situation.

I mean, it is remotely possible that there was some major slowdown on 85 that he decided at the last second to try to avoid by going down Mathilda, and it is possible that he normally took some other route and got surprised by the lane closed sign, but it seems much more likely that either autopilot malfunctioned or he had to react to someone else doing something unsafe. In either case, no amount of signage or highway paint would have made any difference, and the only thing that could have saved his life would have been Caltrans resetting the barrier properly.

Resetting the barrier would likely have saved his life. I still maintain that if the lane didn't drive him into the barrier in the first place, that would have helped. If he's an Apple employee, as you stated, then if he wanted to stay on 85, that does lend some possibility to the idea he wasn't paying full attention. Maybe AP2 drove him a bit right, and some idiot used that space to pass him on the left in the wide open space where the lane ought to be, and then AP2 emergency reacted to that car to his left and pushed him right, and it was too late for him to react. Or maybe a tumbleweed tumbled in and AP2 pushed him right. Or he tapped the brakes for the onramp full of potholes and the car disengaged AP2 and therefore didn't jerk left like it ought to according to the lane paint and his hands were so cold they had no traction on the steering wheel before he realized he wasn't getting it to go left fast enough. Or the sun didn't let AP2 work right, and he was using his company product and was distracted. I wish we knew. The setup there is obvious: drive toward the concrete gore point.

 

[mattack4000]

Just because a lot of us are supermen and superwomen who are able to, at the top of our ability, just barely survive that horrible design, doesn't make it not a horrible design. In fact, we've found out here that it gets crashed into far too often.

You are getting comical at this point. If you can't make that slight jog to stay in your lane, maybe you should check your driving skills. More people die on I-80 in Sierra Nevada each year, are you asking for a tunnel to get through it? Oh wait, do we need a Tesla involved first?

I just used the ramp with AP2, car didn't flinch a bit. The temporary construction wall in Palo Alto was way scarier as some of them stick out pass the yellow line.

 

[f-stop]

If true, then the barrels of sand (or water?) would be better, since they're usually lined up in a triangle like in bowling.

If you really want to immerse yourself in Crash Attenuator knowledge:
http://ahmct.ucdavis.edu/pdf/UCD-ARR-10-07-16-01.pdf
View attachment 289020
...
View attachment 289022

I wish there was "Self-Restoring" crash attenuator there...

Earlier I was wondering why no sand barrels at this location, thinking (perhaps naively) that the barrels must be "better" in that they'd be easier to maintain, cheaper, easier to see, and possibly better at reducing injuries or death than a mechanical smart barrier. Simpler must be better, right?

what I didn't realize was that these barrel type of impact barriers are actually considered disposable aka "sacrificial" as described in the info posted above by @TEG. i.e. you can't simply stand them back up and refill them with sand after an accident. Also, they’re no good at redirecting vehicles that impact at an angle

I came across some further info about impact attenuators using barrels of sand, with a few interesting points
Better barrier and end treatment safety for developing nations

it mentions that sand barrel impact attenuators can cost as little as 1/3 to 1/10 the cost of a smart barrier, and so are best used at sites that are not frequently impacted. Meanwhile, [quote:] "If the impacts are frequent, an economic justification or a benefit-cost analysis should be made to install higher performing, lower maintenance partially reusable or reusable crash cushions."

given the photo/video evidence posted by others that the barrier at this accident site seems to be crashed into frequently, I suppose it makes sense that they've employed a more "economical" solution here by installing a smart barrier. Though I really wonder if they've correctly factored in the true cost of a smart barrier that's not reset/repaired promptly...

Of course it's not the root cause of the accident under discussion, but it seems obvious but they should at least be placing some kind of temporary impact barrier in front of a compressed smart barrier while they wait for it to be properly repaired (whether sand barrels or otherwise).

 

[TEG]

They put a lot of effort into studying "total lifecycle cost" of various crash cushion devices.
I think the reduced cost of the "smart cushion" may only hold true if they reset it between crashes.
I am curious now if it can just be inexpensively reset again, or if it needs a total replacement now since it got hit without being reset.

http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/esc/oe/project_ads_addenda/07/07-295004/supplemental_info/07-295004IH.pdf

Non-Repairable Impacts
There can be instances where the impact is outside the scope of the crash cushion’s design.
This may render the crash cushion unsafe to reuse and it should be replaced.

By the way, someone recently mentioned a similar offramp over on highway 880.
They use a different type of crash cushion over there:

I wonder if those cylinders are rubbery/springy and if it auto-resets when the vehicle is pulled away?

 

[TEG]

While all of your solutions aren't counterproductive by themselves except for the extra signage (which would cause more confusion and distraction, not less), none of them fix the main problem, that the lane was realigned to the right to direct drivers direclty into the gore point (what I've been calling the wall tip). I finally figured out what everyone was saying by "gore" point; maybe I don't watch/play enough violent movies/games, so that wasn't strongly in my vocabulary.

When I first started researching this incident, I too was horrified by them calling it a gore zone, gore point, etc., but then I learned they are using a different meaning for "gore".
Gore (road) - Wikipedia

A gore (British English: nose),[1] refers to a triangular piece of land. Etymologically it is derived from gār, meaning spear.[2] Gores on highways are categorized as two types: the theoretical gore and the physical gore. The physical gore is the unpaved area created between the highway mainline and a ramp that merges into or diverges from the mainline. The theoretical gore is the marked area of pavement resulting from the convergence or divergence of the edge lines of the mainline and ramp. Theoretical gores are commonly marked with transverse lines or chevrons at both entrance and exit ramps. These help drivers entering the highway to estimate how much time they have to match the speed of through traffic, and warn drivers improperly exiting the highway right down the middle of a gore that they are about to run out of road. Gores at exit ramps occasionally feature impact attenuators, especially when there is something solid at the other end of the gore.

 

[dgatwood]

When I first started researching this incident, I too was horrified by them calling it a gore zone, gore point, etc., but then I learned they are using a different meaning for "gore".
Gore (road) - Wikipedia

They are, of course, closely etymologically related. The triangle got its name from a projecting point, which was derived from the Old English word for spear, and the word "gore" meaning disembowel, of course, refers to an animal piercing someone with a projecting point.