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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.
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!
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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
They'd have to be durable in northern climates because anything you put on the road has to be able to withstand getting scraped off of the road by a snowplow.
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.
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