So, Tiger crashed his car a mile or so from my house. I know this road pretty well, driven it in the tank quite a few times when the brakes were suspect (there's a runaway ramp on the road - actually, I believe two!). So, Tiger was driving a loaner vehicle, supposedly, a Hyundai Genesis SUV, so a car he was unfamiliar with. It was early in the morning, maybe he was sleepy. Also, this is a big downhill sloping curve, so maybe he was going too fast.
BUT - I contend (in my opinion) that the design of the road is defective!
Here are some photos from Google Earth.
Here is the first photo showing the gentle bend that is at this part of the road:
As we get a little closer, we see that the road has a median that gets narrower for no apparent reason. As far as I know, this is not a spot where anyone would make a u-turn, nor are these dividers setup or properly designed to facilitate a u-turn. Perhaps these are leftover from years ago where this road was purposed for something else? Just look at how the road edge narrows, and sends a visual cue to your brain to follow along. Tiger visually followed the edge of the road here and presumably slammed into the median directly in front of him.
Here's a view looking back at the median. You'd see this as you drove by if you were sitting in the back seat on the left side of the car and looked back towards the rear of the car. See how the median narrows down to nothing. Bad, bad visual cues.
Here's the Google Earth view from above. As you can see, the road narrows, and it looks like this area would be / could be used for a u-turn. What a dangerous proposition that would be, as nearly everyone would be creamed by the cars coming the other way.
There's even a runaway truck ramp sign right near this median - no way this should be used as u-turn area. It's not even properly designed for that.
Here's a clip from the helicopter shot showing where Tiger's car landed on the hillside. You can see the remains of the white "Welcome to Rolling Hills Estates" sign on the road and the median. The sign is not in the Google Street View photos - I believe it was relatively new.
https://www.google.com/maps/@33.7855206,-118.3658027,3a,75y,76.02h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sO2dPiDfTUoPSYXYZRm_yvQ!2e0!5s2 0150301T000000!7i13312!8i6656
Now I'm not a fan of golf really at all, and I hope that Tiger makes a full recovery. But it makes me angry when I see things that are poorly designed and lead the eye / brain in directions that it shouldn't be going. When I was at MIT our incoming class had to read the following book:
https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expanded/dp/0465050654
This book taught us to be intelligent designers and to make sure that we took responsibility not to incorporate ridiculous or faulty elements in our design. This seems like a clear example of that! *grrrr*
-Wayne