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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.
Here come the "Soviet Russia" jokes.
In Capitalist America, Road Marker Marks YOU!
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!
5mm? 70mph? What if I'm driving in a quarter inch of water at 115kph?
Mom says my
FWIW, the correct term for these items is RPM, or "Raised Pavement Marker".
F) Drive along with a truck and a shovel, collecting enough solar panels and batteries to power your house.
then we could start a company that tore the markers off the road then sold them back to the Company. We will be rich! Or maybe we will make Marks to Mark where the road markers end up... there is an Idea for you.
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
Here.
Lets just get it out of the way
F) CowboyNeal
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
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.
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.
Those little studs are great. There's some newly paves roads in our area that have long curves with steep dropoffs and the painted lines really don't show up well on rainy nights.
They placed the road studs on one of these roads and they practically glow compared to the paint. If the self-illuminating kind become readily available and easily placed it would be great for areas that see a lot of inclement weather.
Might cut down on the number of oncoming cars that drift into my lane on during the commute home as well. Now if we could just jam cell phone use in cars.
is if the government started putting leds embedded into the pavement and they could send you messages (eg. accident up ahead, work zone, speed limit changed to XXmph, etc) to you while you're driving having the message pace with your car.
Also, you could make lanes that are dynamic during the day and night. (They already have those with changing street signs).
Real time stopping distance approxomations (are you following too close?). Lane change "handoffs" (the road infront of you goes orange because someone is turning into that lane.)
It's would be the same technology used for those rotating led clocks.
Of course, it'll all be moot when people finally let computers do the driving for them.
-- dK
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?
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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
...ever since I saw embedded reflectors in the UK. Problem is, where I live, we get large amounts of snow and ice building up on the roads. Sometimes when I'm driving on the highway, my mind will turn to the notion of holographic lane markers... or some equivalent system that would interact with the windshield of the car to visibly plot lanes etc... How about it, physicists of /.? Any brilliant ideas?
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
In a pretty recent issue of Spectrum (the IEEE "trade" mag), there was a piece on a sensor network being used on an island off Massachusetts to study birds that lived on an island in that region.
The sensor were about the size of golf balls, and had sensors for info like temperature, humidity, etc., were battery powered, and capable of creating their own network along which they could relay info.
Here, sounds like they're trading size for range of functions - but that's to be expected. Sensors, sensors, everywhere, and where does all that info go ...
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!
-b0s0z0ku
Also, I expect these sensors to read the RFID tags embedded in tires.
"We all break the law regarding speeding," Mr. Kerridge said. "The system may leave a bad taste in motorists' mouths at the beginning. But when their insurance starts going down and stolen vehicles start getting recovered, the benefits will overcome that."
My insurance has never gone down with the same company here in CA. I have to switch providers for a $100 break, then it goes up, up, then I have to switch again. Perfect record.
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."
Is for them to flash in sequence, so you see little ribbons of light flowing down the freeway. Trouble is, for it to look interesting, the lights would have to appear to be moving at about three to four times the speed limit. Which would encourage a certain class of Stupid Person to try and keep up with them.
Actually, that's a very clever thought: if they could be set to sequence at exactly the speed limit, they'd be a great 'heads-up' speed (and speed limit) indicator - "if you're passing the little flashing lights, you're speeding."
Carthago delenda est!
Why on earth would you be outside at midnight? Sounds suspicious to me.
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.
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
I don't think theyre made by the same company, but the ones on the road from Eckington to Chesterfield in the UK look like ordinary cats eye road studs, but contained within each one is a small rechargable battery, a solar cell, a few LED's, and a microchip pic microcontroller. As you approach them at night, once they detect a small ammount of light from your headlamps, they light up pretty bright, and continue to shine for a few seconds after you have passed. They look pretty spooky when you look in the rear view mirror and see them still flickering away (they don't light up constant but instead flash quite rapidly like the LED puch bike lamps). I believe the ones on the test site on this road were developed by an ex fireman.
is having all sorts of commercials follwing you around on the road.
I guess the better option would still be to have the messages sent by wifi to the car's computer and displayed on its screen, so you can read them easily. Reading stuff off the pavement while driving is not exactly convenient.
Interesting point though. It will probably happen, too (in one form or another), but not very soon.
>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
I can imagine this will make road repairs a real joy, because now you have to *carefully* pry out all these electronic studs before you can repave (or even just reseal) the road surface.
Because driving slower kills fewer pedestrians
Will these things light the interstate up red if a pedestrain is walking there?
Those pedestrians shouldn't be walking along the interstate! That is just asking for a Darwin award. I know it would suck if you had a flat or ran out of gas, but really you shouldn't walk on the shoulder of the interstate. You should be off the road entirely if you ever need to walk there.
You know, there's an ironic thing about the speed limit. I don't think that police really want to strictly enforce it. If they did, what would happen? There would be a tremendous flood of tickets issued at first... There would be serious outcry from the majority of people who feel the limit is too low... They would probably raise it slightly, but not enough to really matter...
It's just like the weekly poker night that I host. I tell people: "Show up no later than 8:00, or cards will be dealt and your hands will be folded." Now, we don't really enforce that rule, but there has to be some rule in place, just because, otherwise, if I said, "Show up anytime from 7:00 to 9:00," then the first guy would show up at 9:30, and the game would start sometime around midnight.
There has to be some speed limit, but strict enforcement just isn't good for anyone -- especially the police.
If you want to identify who's driving where. Ignoring the obvious privacy concerns, it's not that bad an idea. For example, my uncle got hit biking by a hit-and-run. Shattered pelvis - never able to bike again. At least with RFID tags in the license plates that would have been able to track down the truck that hit him.
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.
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Streetdot epoxy is among the strongest glues I know of for good reason. They are practicaly impossible to remove without removing a large segemnt of asphalt. I've tried collecting street dots, and the only way to do it is with a pickaxe... and you try going in the street with a pickaxe and playing a game of collect the dots.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Actually doors are kind of nice for other reasons:
- They keep (most) people out of my house.
- They hide Old People Sex so I won't go blind while driving down the street (and mask the sound of wrinkly liverspotted skin rubbing on wrinkly liverspotted skin).
- They provide us exercise by making us get up to let cats/dogs in/out.
So rather than take off all doors, just plan on having a BigBrotherCam(tm) installed for your protection instead (the 1984 kind not the TV show kind).
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Right. Force. Like pounds. ;-)
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
Or if they do, they won't last past the first snow. Along comes a snowplow, and *pop* *pop* *pop* there go the reflectors, smart or not, right into the ditch. Along with the odd hunk of concrete that was sticking up, unlucky mailboxes, small cars...
Nice idea for SoCal, tho.
I am reposting this, within 30 min. of it's previous post by another AC it got modded down. Since it is obviously insightfull and ontopic I can only conclude either massive idiocy on the part of modders or deliberate supression.
:
TOP SECRET FACT:Most modern cars have tracking transponders!
Spy transmission chips embedded in tires that can be read REMOTELY while driving.
A secret initiative exists to track all funnel-points on interstates and US borders for car tire ID transponders (RFid chips embedded in the tire).
Yup. My brother works on them.
Your tires have a passive coil with 64 to 128 bit serial number emitter in them! (AIAG B-11 ADC v3.0) . A particular frequency energizes it enough so that a receiver can read its little ROM. A ROM which in essence is your GUID for your TIRE. Multiple tires do not confuse the readers. Its almost identical to all "FastPass" "SpeedPass" technologies you see on gasoline keychain dongles and commuter windshield sticker-chips. The US gov has secretly started using these chips to track people.
Its kind of like FBI "Taggants" in fertilizer and "Taggants" in Gasoline and Bullets, and Blackpowder. But these car tire transponder Ids are meant to actively track and trace movement of your car.
Taggant research papers
http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/byteserv.prl/ ~ota/disk3/1980/8017/801705.PDF
(remove spaces in url from slashcode if needed)
I am not making this up. Melt down a high end Firestone, or Bridgestone tire and go through the bits near the rim (sometimes at base of tread) and you will locate the transmitter (similar to 'grain of rice' pet ids and Mobile SpeedPass, but not as high tech as the tollbooth based units). Sokymat LOGI 160, and Sokymat LOGI 120 transponder buttons are just SOME of the transponders found in modern high end car tires. The AIAG B-11 Tire tracking standard is now implemented for all 3rd party transponder manufactures [covered below].
It is for QA and to prevent fraud and "car theft", but the US Customs service uses it in Canada to detect people who swap license plates on cars when doing a transport of contraband on a mule vehicle that normally has not logged enough hours across the border. The customs service and FBI do not yet talk about this, and are starting using it soon.
Photos of chips before molded into tires:
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:TAQIKjBI01g C: www.sokymat.com/sp/applications/tireid.html
(slashdot ruins links, so you will have to remove the ASCII space it insertess usually into the url above to get to the shocking info and photos on the enbedded LOGI 160 chips that the us gov scans when you cross mexican and canadian borders.)
You never heard of it either because nobody moderates on slashdot anymore and this is probably +0 still. It has also never appeared in print before and is very secret.
Californias Fastpass is being upgraded to scan ALL responding car tires in future years upcoming. I-75 may get them next in rural funnel points in Ohio.
http://www.tadiran-telematics.com/products6.html
but the fact is... YOU PROBABLY ALREADY HAVE A RADIO TRANSPONDER not counting your digital cell phone which is routinely silently pulsed in CA bay area each rush hour morning unless turned off (consult Wired Magazine Expose article). Those data point pulses are used by NSA on occasions.
The us FBI with NRO/NSA blessings, has requested us gov make this tire scanning information as secret as the information regarding all us inkjet printers sold in usa in the last 3 years using "yellow" GUID barcode under dark ink regions to serialize printouts to thwart counterfeiting of 20 dollar bills. (30 to 40 percent of ALL California counterfeiting is done using cheap Epson inkjet printers, most purchased with credit cards foolishly). Luckily court dockets divulge the existence of the Epson serial numbers on your printouts... but nobody except
D) use infrared ranging and embedded cameras to detect and report the license number of anyone speeding on the road;
States rely too much upon the fines for speeding. They have optimized their income with the current system. If speed detection was made 100% reliable, no one would do it and the states wouldn't make any money off of it.
This is a part of the reason why interlock devices aren't placed on all cars at the factory. Everyone hates "drunk driving", but they make so much money off of it that they don't want it to completely stop.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Something that's prety much completely overlooked in these discussions of "auto ticketing for over the limit" is that setting one speed limit for all vehicles ignores the differences between vehicles that are based on physics and manufacturing quality.
:-> ) is the overloaded minivan going 85.
In my Z3, I can (safely) take corners at speeds far in excess of the posted "recommended" limits. Indeed, I frequently don't actually need to slow down for the corners. That's because the car's center of gravity is extremely low, the wide tires provide huge contact patches, and the car is almost perfectly balanced (50/50 front/rear). Add to the mix the outstanding OEM suspension, and it is completely safe to take the corner above the recommended speed.
In my sisters Ford Excursion, however, a speed below the posted recommended limit is necessary to keep the behemoth between the lines. It has a high center of gravity, a terrible contact patch/weight ratio, and bad front/rear balance. Plus, being made by Ford, the suspension feels like a pair of overstretched rubber bands. The posted recommended limit is too high for that thing.
Impossible, but I'd like to see speed limits take into account the physics that control how safe a vehicle is at speed. Much more frightening to me than a sports car travelling at 100 mph (not me
That'll probably arrive right after the IQ requirement for driver's licenses.
Dan D
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Since they can also form packs, they can turn into a revenue center for municipalities either by extorting money from homeless people in the neighborhood or by breaking them up for parts.
Version 2.5 will include the ability to self-assemble, leading the end of life as we know it. Personally, I salute our new artifically-intelligent speed bump overlords!
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.
It's not so much the ploughs I'm worried about, it's the fact that our roads are covered with snow and ice before and after ploughing - i.e., for most of the winter. Anything embedded would disappear exactly when most needed - low visibility due to snow & night, snow covering existing lane markers.
Seriously, it's a problem. We just had the Trans-Canada Highway closed for a couple of days due to heavy snow. Increased lane visibility would eliminate one part of the problem. Cheers!
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
We've already got these in the UK - some roads have cat's eyes with LEDs in them and they're great. It makes driving so much easier.
However, they do have the side effect of making drivers go "Ooh! Glowy cat's eyes!" and switch off their headlights to see them better... hence, they're statistically rather dangerous!
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
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.
They could also be RADAR transcievers for automatic navigation systems in cars and trucks.
The vehicle could send a ping which includes information about its destination or path, and the marker could send back a ping which contains information about upcoming hazards, speed limit changes, construction zones, road conditions, etc.
Thus the road edges and distinctions between lanes can be discerned by the nav system by simple ranging, and additional info can be trasmitted by the road itself to the cars using it.
Speaking for myself I'd that the reason why so many slashdotters are wary of such technologies is because we know technology well enough to know that it's not a panacea to all (or really any) social problems and we understand the potential for abuse that comes with any complex, secretive technology controlled by a group or agency that operate de facto without public oversight/control. We're also, as a group, less prone to take sweeping promises about what a new technology can and will do for us at face value mostly because we've heard so many that proved to be damn lies when the dust settled: "Face recognition cameras will only spot terrorists!"; "The new bomb scanners will make air travel safer and more convientent, and no false positives!"; "Peoplesoft is an easy to use and cost effective solution to your HR needs"; "The speed sensors are for your own protection citizen" etc...
Also, speficically regard objections to automated traffic enforcement scams such as this a lot of object because we know that the stated objective, "increased safety", and promised benefits, "lower insurance rates" are total bullshit. If increased road safety were the goal then stealth enforcement wouldn't be seen as a benefit, bright red flags and flashing lights would mark the intersections dangergous enough to warrant traffic spy-cams and people would slow down, thus saving lives. That and having traffic engineers set the speed limit to a speed that the road can safely handle, or better yet pump the money being tossed into spy-cams into smart roads with adaptive speed limits. So yeah I'm afriad of any revenue generating, control increasing technology marketed as a safety device.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
What if Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist does a guest column on Slashdot?
The company bets that you are young and strong and that nothing is ever going to happen to you.
You bet you are going to die tomorrow, and that your babies need some dollars quick.
Once you pass a certain amount of time with the insurance company without anything bad happening to you, they start winning.
Solution:
1) take out insurance
2) OW OW OW OW!
3) profit!
Catseye reflecting studs already line thousands of miles of highways, without such prohibitive problems.
--
make install -not war
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.
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