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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.
How about, if the company can make them cheap enough then think up some ingenious distribution method to replace the reflectors on millions of miles of roadways they'd be everywhere?
Banaaaana!
Here come the "Soviet Russia" jokes.
Preemptively taken care of: from the in-soviet-russia dept
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Except for those of us who live in an area which requires snow plowing. I don't care how cheap you can build them... they still won't be cheap enough to replace them all every year!
Snow plows. Granted, you can embed them in a track in between lanes but that gets expensive over large sections of roadway. Cool idea, though, will probably be most useful in areas that don't get enough snow to warrant plowing.
Quintus malus puer est.
On another note, at least mention the fact the article is New York Times.
Now for on topic stuff... I like the idea of flashing lights for crosswalks, but not so much the cameras. It's sort of messed up to think that every single reflector in the road can be a camera.
Also, at what point does this start becoming a distraction? Can I see the lights from my front window? Being LEDs, I would hope not, but it'd be nice to know. I also would be interested in seeing whether these things stand up to the weight of a Chicago winter... regardless of what the article says. :-)
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
As I say every time this subject comes up, I'd much rather have my car know the max speed on a given road for a given set of conditions and not be allowed to go over the max speed, than I want fancy electronics to check to see if I go over the max speed, and if I do, take my picture, and send me a ticket. I'd rather pay higher taxes than fund police through tickets (and we wouldn't need as much traffic police either if the cars were smarter).
I claim that if no one could go over the speed limit, traffic would flow much more smoothly, and if the limit is too low (because you are expected to speed 10 mph), we will all complain loudly enough to get it changed.
Other aspects of this project sound interesting though.
Dara Parsavand
In the upper states (buffalo, etc) and many parts of Canada, they have a great deal of trouble with things like these. Snow plows simply pick anything not level with the road off. Even if they're dug down a bit into the pavement, they still get damaged and eventually get picked out. I don't think that it's going to work to well up here.
Now, figure out how to do all that in a paint and then you're a kabillionair!
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
while people will really like these if they do only the 'safety' tasks (illuminated, warnings for fog, standing water, ...), there's no way they wouldn't be vandalized instantly if they were used for speed limit enforcement.
-- the cake is a lie
My first reaction is:
LED lit roads - good
Roads that track you everywhere you go - Bad
So why does such a good idea have to become "real-world bloatware"?
What post? The one you're carrying inside your rusty innards!
Also, I expect these sensors to read the RFID tags embedded in tires.
Fat frickin' chance. Price went down for CD manufacturing. Did the price at Best Buy drop any? No. Are the Insurance companies any more ethical than the RIAA? Hell no.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I've seen the flashing crosswalk lights already, and I can say that they're not that bright - not really any brighter than a road reflector, but without having to depend on reflecting light to be seen.
When there's fog, or heavy rain, or snow, and the painted lines on the road can't be seen, these could REALLY help in driving. Back when I lived in Michigan, I always hated driving at night when it was raining - there were no reflectors on the roads, and it was literally impossible to see where the lanes were. You just had to guess, and it could be unpleasant at times.
Even if it's raining so hard even your wipers can't keep up, I'd think these things would help let you know where the lanes were so you could have a much easier time getting somewhere safe to stop.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Makes you wonder about whether the cost of insurance will rise as a result of this. If you get in an accident and down a street light, they'll send your insurance company a bill for a new street light. If you get in an accident and take out 5 or 6 solar-powered weather computers, your insurance company will be paying out the nose for parts.
Initial costs, reliability, expected lifespans. The conditions are:
1) Outdoors in extreme temperature ranges,
2) Very high humidity, and often corrosive atmosphere,
3) Physically very small,
4) Reasonably immune to physical damage (salt/sand sludge + snowplows do _nasty_ things to optical windows.)
Power has to come from batteries at night; what is the battery life under industrial temperatures (-20 to 150F, forex.) Concrete doesn't get quite that hot, but asphault does.
You can get away with powering LEDs with a supercap and a switcher, should have a better lifespan than a NiCD or SLA, but they're physically larger and not as robust (As well as pricey.) But that won't cut it for cameras or radios. So you have to replace the batteries every few years.
These are not traditional road studs. 5" wide?? These are huge; the normal installation methods won't work.
I'd like to see their business case. Almost certainly relies on questionable safety increases or revenue from being a speed trap.
My state is running a multi-year reliability study on more traditional road studs (including those nifty blue reflectors) on various roads around the area.
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
>While I'm willing to applaud better-lit roads, why incorporate speed traps?
Because driving slower kills fewer pedestrians, and no matter how many times we *ask* drivers to obey the law, they won't. So we have to make them.
>I mean, I guess it could be argued that if you obey the law you have nothing to fear
Yes, you could argue that.
http://milkshake.dexy.org
When your father is on his death bed in a hospital 40 miles away and you and your siblings want to get there to see him before he passes, I'm sure you'll want your car to be stuck doing the speedlimit...
I also didn't buy a car with a 4.6L V8 to be hampered by built-in speed controls. Some people find driving fun you know.
Does anyone else seem to think that these 'SolarLites' are useless as soon as a few dozen diesel spewing tractor trailers pass by?
Mars Rover teams are/were worried about dust on the panels, what about smoot on these? (Anyone who has seen black snow on a highway knows this would be a huge problem).
Insurance companies offer all sorts of discounts if you qualify.
At Allstate I have/had Safe drive and good discounts.
They also give you breaks if you have safety features such as Antilock breaks and theft deterrent systems, such as reinforced ignition plates(not sure of the name, but you get the idea) The lower your rate when you pass a certain age, if you a Guy.
Granted you can look at it as a cup half-empty/half-full thing. But the fact is there are many different rates in auto insurance.
And this is the problem with using analogies.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
If you really fucking think the cost of reproducing a CD is indicative of how much it should cost, you sir are an idiot.
Past that, the fist CDs I bought were around $18. Most these days I can pick up at BestBuy at $10 - $13. This is 10 years later and inflation has pushed the prices of everything else up. Yet, the human power that it costs to record a CD is still the same.
Are the insurance companies any more ethical than the RIAA? No, they are company and as such amoral -- their only goal is to make money.
Fucking moron brat...get a job hippie.
This would help to solve one of the problems with an auto driving car, as witnessed in the DARPA grand challenge: vision. If the roads were implanted with these with an rfid tag (uniquely identified for each road/lane) it would be easy to reckon your absolute position relative to the road and detect things like an upcoming dip in the road, etc. making it much easier to drive a car autonomously. Cruise control that adjusts speed according to the traffic ahead of you is already present. The only issue is what would happen in fail safe mode where there were markers missing or burnt out/ slashdotter vandalized.
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.
On the other hand, if all cars had an ugly pig-iron rear bumper which is not considered "damaged" if scratched and has a good system of hyrdolic shocks going through the length of the car which allows it to recoil against a 30 MPH collision without impacting the body or frame, "fender bender" accidents would start costing about $0, and probably involve fewer whiplash incidents. Rates would go down for everybody.
But that would be too practical. People prefer pretty-looking safety equipment over stuff that works as it should. No politician could ever pass such a law and hope to be re-elected.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
So, if you drive 20,000 miles a year, you can expect a 2004 car to get you to 2014 and beyond, by which time the cars coming out then will be so vastly superior you will want another new one anyway, especially since you will be 10 years older and probably in a higher income bracket.
Car bodies are now designed to give themselves up in high-speed collisions to save the lives of the drivers. I know, because a drunk driver hit my 2003 Nissan pick-up truck head on (off-set front collision... the classic horror story safety testers like to focus on), shattering the entire engine compartment to little pieced. When my ears stopped ringing from the air bag deployment, I noticed that I was not only unharmed, but listening to the music of my CD player, which continued to play through the entire accident!
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Falling rates are a fallacious concept. Insurance, Government and other organised criminal associations are already screwing us silly, and there is little we can do against it. They will rise and rise until the common citizen decides it is no longer affordable to play by the rules, and that will result in civil disobedience and/or a really nasty war against The Man.
Or we might just move to Mexico and give everyone the finger.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Ever think about this?
Where do we get reports saying that speeding causes more deaths and accidents? Insurance agencies.
Insurance companies base rate on points.
Number 1 reason for points, speeding tickets.
Number 1 lobbyer against repealing speeding laws? insurance agencies.
Non-insurance agency reports generally say that speeding doesn't make an accident any better or worse.
We don't like speeding laws but we never get the chance to vote them away based on companies funding campaigns full of biased data. This is a perfect example of a republic failing where a democracy would have succeeded.
The republic was made because tallying votes from every person wasn't possible so we tallied the votes for an area and let them vote as a block. Now that it is possible (diebold aside) it's time to implement the democracy.
Catseye reflecting studs already line thousands of miles of highways, without such prohibitive problems.
--
make install -not war