Slashdot Mirror
Road Marker Marks You
If you could make a reflective road marker (a "road stud", in the jargon) that contained a small solar cell and battery, you would be able to: A) power a LED at night to provide lit lanes, not just reflection; B) monitor for fog or water on the road surface; C) monitor the temperature to detect ice; D) use infrared ranging and embedded cameras to detect and report the license number of anyone speeding on the road; E) All of the above. If the company can make them cheap enough, they'll be everywhere in a few years.
FWIW, the correct term for these items is RPM, or "Raised Pavement Marker".
Here.
this
In a Road That's All Eyes, the Driver Finds an Ally
By IAN AUSTEN
ABOUT 12 years ago, Martin Dicks was trapped in dense fog during a harrowing four-hour commute to his job as a firefighter in central London.
"Virtually all I could see on the road was a cat's-eye reflector every now and then," Mr. Dicks said, recalling his trip down one of Britain's major highways. "I figured that if I could make the cat's-eyes more visible, I could probably save more lives than I could in the fire service."
A back injury forced Mr. Dicks out of the fire department shortly afterward, giving him the time to pursue that goal. His training as an electrical engineer provided the necessary skills.
Now, after perfecting illuminated markers that are embedded in the road surface to guide motorists through bad weather or warn of dangerous conditions, Mr. Dicks's company, Astucia Traffic Management Systems, is going a step further. Its latest creation is an embedded stud equipped with a camera that catches speeders, monitors traffic for criminals or stolen cars and even checks for bald tires on the fly.
"Nobody knows it's a camera or a speed trap," Mr. Dicks said of his latest creation.
Mr. Dicks's original idea was quite simple in concept. He wanted to create an illuminated road marker containing its own power source, a solar cell. At night or in bad weather, light from approaching vehicles would generate enough power to light up the marker, which consisted of light-emitting diodes. An illuminated marker would be more visible than a plain reflector, and the idea was that a car passing over the markers would cause them to stay illuminated long enough so that they would provide a warning trail of lights for any vehicles close behind.
The trouble, at first, was the technology available in the early 1990's. Photovoltaic cells were not as efficient as they are today. And at the time, Mr. Dicks recalled, "the concept of a white L.E.D. was nowhere."
Working mostly with family members at first, Mr. Dicks produced a prototype marker within two years. He dodged the white L.E.D. problem by combining the glow from red, green and blue arrays. The group not only overcame the limitations of solar cells, but also managed to engineer markers that turned red to warn when the gap between two cars was dangerously small.
Mr. Dicks said the technology both impressed and alarmed British government highway officials.
"They were frightened about everyone using the product on roads from one end of the country to the other," he said. "They thought it would make their budgets disappear."
The first markers cost roughly twice the price of conventional embedded road studs. As a result, their use was restricted at first to especially fog-prone or dangerous sections of roads as well as crosswalks, including some in the United States.
Mr. Dicks was not the only person with a desire to illuminate to road markers. After a friend struck and killed a pedestrian in 1991 at a crosswalk in Santa Rosa, Calif., Michael Harrison developed a system that uses flashing L.E.D.'s in the road surface to make crosswalks more visible. The company he founded in 1994, LightGuard Systems, now has about 700 installations in the United States.
A study of 100 illuminated crosswalks by Katz, Okitsu & Associates, a traffic engineering firm based in Southern California, estimates that adding the blinking L.E.D.'s to crosswalks can reduce pedestrian accidents by 80 percent.
The original Astucia markers were glued onto the road surface. That left them vulnerable to snowplow blades and to constant pounding from car and truck tires.
Mr. Dicks wanted to put the markers into holes drilled into the road surface. The key, he said, was finding self-healing resins for the top lenses that would be flush with the surface and subjected to much wear and tear.
"It's like running your fingernail on a rubber sheet," he said of the plastics' behavior. "The mark it leaves goes away."
A
Apparently, they are now doing full page hijacking ads.
Reg-Free, Straight to the page without hijacking link.
Blah, Blah, Blah - RTFA.
"The original Astucia markers were glued onto the road surface. That left them vulnerable to snowplow blades and to constant pounding from car and truck tires.
Mr. Dicks wanted to put the markers into holes drilled into the road surface. The key, he said, was finding self-healing resins for the top lenses that would be flush with the surface and subjected to much wear and tear."
This all ties into the "Smart Road" which has been in development at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA for several years. Including monitoring of road and weather conditions along with sending advisories to drivers.
Sig removed by order of FBI Patriot ACT
IIRC, states get Federal funding for road projects. As a result, even the poorest state tends to keep their road construction budget quite high.
Of course, this only applies to the US.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
sheesh, I'd accept a temporary increase in my vehicle registration for a couple of years to see these on the farm roads here in Texas.
You haven't lived until you've torn a chunk of the drivers seat out with your ass because of an unexpected turn.
For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of driving on a farm road in Texas, here's a brief description.
1.5 lanes wide
No shoulder
Painted lines optional
Random livestock
"Lame" - Galaxar
No, a gram is a measure of mass. A newton is a measure of weight, which is a force.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
Actually, gram is mass, newton is mass * acceleration which is equivalent to weight when referring to the acceleration due to gravity...
I print, therefore I am.
What kind of dumbass modded this up? A gram measures mass; weight is the force exerted on an object due to gravity.
My only concern would be with night time. Unless these would only be used on highways with street lights, I can imagine all sorts of safety problems with a firing flash bulb in the face of a speeding driver. Red-light cameras don't have this problem because they're usually positioned in bright light areas and are used in low-speed situations.
The article covers this already. Dig hole, embed reflector/sensor...
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Actually, we only use GMT in the winter. At the moment we're on BST which is one hour ahead.
Step 1: Install little spy bumps.
Step 2: ??????
Step 3: Extra revenue.
You can take our Soviet Russia cliche, but you can never take our underpants gnomes cliche!
</Braveheart>
What is next, a "First Post" headline?
I hate sigs.
It's my understanding that the studs are embedded in the roadway and cannot be hit. As this page backs up, there is only a 4mm spot that is raised above the pavement, which allows snow removal to occur over it.
If a snowplow isn't taking them out, neither will you.
Its not just the bumper its the entire car.
Make cars that are designed to be easily fixed and that last forever(moving parts should be easy to replace). Sure the auto industry won't make billions and employ a few thousand. But the small local garages will have more work to make up for the lost jobs and you won't be using as much power/resources.
This model works, look at most professional trucks or equipment. Most trucks are expected to work for well over 30 years. They can last nearly for ever if you make the mechanical parts easy to replace.
We have to get away from our disposible ways. With technology rapidly changing its difficult but alot of things don't change.
God, root, what is the difference?
From my years of driving in 2M+ person cities, I've had time to observe what slows down traffic flow.
Three things: braking (slow spots), inattention/under-limit driving, and fear.
- Slow Spots
What slows down traffic flow most is people braking when they don't need to, or braking more than they need to. The problem is that in congested traffic, once one car slows in one lane, a wedge of cars behind him slows, and behind them everyone slows.
Then when that one driver speeds up (and it takes much longer to speed up than slow down), the next cars THEN speed up. They don't speed up exactly when the lead driver does because it takes them time to see the change. This carries on behind them.
This creates a slow spot on the freeway. Once a slow spot is created, it only goes away once a gap backwards in traffic is large enough to allow the slowed vehicles to speed up to normal speed before the gap is completely closed by the approaching traffic.
- Under-limit Driving
This is obvious. Left or center lane driver drops below speed limit, cars behind have to slow (often they use their brake instead of coasting down), and you're in the situation above (slow spot).
- Fear
Car needs in another lane. Most drivers, if there is room ahead of the vehicle beside them, will still brake and try to fall in behind the neighboring vehicle. The following vehicles in that lane may not be friendly, and may not allow that. So fearful driver brakes even more, hoping to eventually get over. I've even seen some fools come to a complete stop in the middle of the freeway so they can hopefully work across 3 lanes to exit. They should have either sped up and pulled in front, or if that took too long, gradually worked their way over, missed their exit, and looped back.
These things don't mean you should never brake, or that you should always drive aggressively, but some middle ground approach would surely improve things. The time cost for a full traffic jam is enormous. 5 minutes times 200,000 vehicles is 11 days of time. In a perverse way that's a really significant amount of power that one driver can exercise. Create a good traffic jam and you've just wasted 11 days of your town's time.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I've noticed new markers being installed on the highways. The markers in the opposite lane illuminate red, your lane is white, and the sides are yellow. I noticed the ones in the opposite direction aren't always visible though. any idea if this is related?
Almost completely unrelated.
Markers are setup to show white on one side and red on the other, so if you're going the opposite direction down the lane you should see red all over, and if you're going the right direction you see white. The sides are yellow on both sides, but there's something about the yellow markers that's supposed to distinguish no-passing zones from passing zones, I just don't remember it right off hand. The reflectors are specially designed to only light up when hit from certain angles, generally. When you see the markers in the opposite lanes, it's usually due to ambiant lighting, not actual reflection. If you go over to the opposite lane, I just about guarantee you'll see the reflectors all light up, RED. Try it sometime on a very very low traffic road. (I discovered the red part of the reflectors in Waco once, accidentally turned down a one-way. Scary)
Blue markers indicate fire hydrants, and there's some other colors for other things, I think. Someone will probably google up a site with more information than I've given. ;)
Oh yeah, in express lanes that have to go both directions, the markers are white on both sides, obviously.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Well actually its not
The UTC (or Universal Coordinated Time) scale is an atomic timescale by universal agreement, that is, everyone compares their atomic clocks and adjusts towards the common agreement.
While GMT is an astronomical timescale from observation.
This means UTC is pretty constant while GMT might move around a bit with the decaying orbit of the earth.
Over long periods GMT usually falls behind so every few years we have a Leap Second to bring them back into approximate alignment.
So we use UTC for all our time measuring, but we need to monitor GMT to know when to correct UTC, otherwise they would slowly drift apart.
But to a 'less than a second' approximation, they are about the same.
More details here BIPM Website
Is that clear now?
John
The outer shell of my rear bumper is made of brittle plastic and painted to match the rest of the car body. If some poor bastard accidently rear-ends my car at 5 MPH, the bumber will have to be replaced ($400), and then a body-shop worker will have to carefully match the faded paint on the rest of the car when painting the new one ($350) and that's not even counting the lights and stuff. Also, if he hits me at anything over 15 MPH, the bumper will fail to absorb all the shock, causing damage to the body and running the repair bill into the thousands. All of our rates are higher because of cars like mine.
Bullshit bullshit bullshit.
There's a plastic bumper cover, yes indeedy. Then there's usually half an inch to a whole inch (sometimes more) of styrofoam. In a collision, that styrofoam will crush, absorbing kinetic energy and distributing it across the entire area of the bumper. Both the plastic cover and the styrofoam are one-use parts and are designed to be replaced after each collision.
Then, underneath all that, you typically find a regular steel bumper (although a bit lighter, thanks to the benefits of styrofoam) and--get this--shock absorbers.
Bumpers today work completely different than the ones put out 30 years ago. Bumpers today distribute the energy of the collision and absorb it in more places before it even gets to the frame. This allows car manufacturers to manufacture lighter "weaker" frames (unibodies, mostly), giving us better gas mileage, better performance, and generally cheaper cars (adjusted for inflation, of course, but I read recently that a $10k car today was actually less expensive than a $2k car in the '50s).
We've learned a lot about what actually happens in a collision.
Now let's take a look at my truck (and yes, truck frames haven't changed much). My truck is a '71 Chevy Custom 10 with trailer mirrors and a positrac rear end (that's what the "custom" means). It rolled off the dealer floor like this. It has two big-ass steel bumpers on the front and back, and they are bolted directly to the frame. So, in a collision, all of the kinetic energy that the truck must absorb must be absorbed in the frame. This makes the likelihood that even a small collision will cause more structural damage to my truck much higher than, say, my wife's 2001 Toyota Corolla, with the plastic bumper cover, styrofoam, and shock absorbers. Sure, it's more expensive to replace the bumber crap on her car than my truck, but in a *serious* collision, is it more expensive to fix her car or my truck? Probably my truck. IN fact, it's probably more expensive to fix my truck than it is to buy a brand new Toyota Corolla to replace her old one (it's a disposable car, let's face it).
So, now we get to the meat of the issue. The same wreck that bent my frame that would've probably totalled her car also probably saw her walking away from the wreck while I was being loaded into an ambulance. When it's all said and done, which wreck was more expensive?
Finally, there are laws in place that require cars manufactured to meet certain standards in a collision, and the 5 mph test is just one of them. The focus of the laws is to save lives, of course. There are numerous occasions where manufacturers have designed cars that are specifically designed to sacrifice itself to save the passengers (cab-forward design is a good one, the passenger compartment rises to the top of the wreck, more or less untouched, while the rest of the car buckles). If car manufacturers were to focus on the monetary damages to the car instead of the health and safety of the passengers, we'd see injuries skyrocketing (again) and the death toll rising. Instead we see both injuries and deaths falling while number of drivers are rising (this is based on a vague recollection of numbers I read a few years ago).
Of course, if money is more important to you than your fucking ass living through a wreck, feel free to go pick up an older car that matches your safety requirements. Mind you, that's no guarantee it'll cost less to fix, what with supply and demand and how it'll affect the price of body parts. Best thing to do is to just not get into a wreck in the first place.
Like what I said? You might like my music