I'm just talking about competent urban planning, jackass!
Things like zoning to put homes, jobs, and stores close together; using a grid street pattern with small blocks instead of a dendritic one so that people don't have to drive 5 miles out onto main roads just to get to the shopping center that their backyard backs up to; putting in normal public transportation (buses and subways); etc. Shit that places like New York City, London, and Tokyo had figured out 100 years ago, before the planners started wanking over superhighways and suburbs. See also new urbanism.
It's not that fucking hard, as long as you don't suddenly get a million Tata-owning assholes whining about traffic in New Delhi like the SUV-owning assholes do in Los Angeles!
Now, go take your defeatist hyperbole and kindly fuck off. Thanks.
No, the real question we should be asking, is "how can we arrange our cities such that people don't want cars in the future, in order to provide the same convenience and standard of living without all the harmful side effects?" America, having designed all its infrastructure for automobiles for the past 50 years, is screwed. India isn't... yet.
You know, X11 Mac apps do that. You click on the Gimp.app (for example) icon in the dock (or in/Applications), and it starts. If X11 isn't running yet, it automatically launches. And you don't have to "dump out" to anything, either -- native app windows and X app windows are on the same desktop.
...and apparently going to get bailed out because they are 'upside down' in their homes. Why?
The problem isn't necessarily that their homes lost value. The problem is that they made the stupid decision to get adjustable-rate mortgages and can't afford to pay since the rate went up, but can't refinance because the bank won't give them a loan for more than the property is worth. The root problem was idiots buying things they couldn't afford, but the drop in values exacerbated it.
Well no, they have "Assisted GPS" which augments the satellites with cell towers just as you mentioned in your second paragraph (except perhaps without having to enable it manually).
Ireland are considering changing, but they're going to do it in stages. One week the cars, next week the buses and then if that works OK the following month they'll do bikes & trucks.
I will gently tap my brake lights a couple of times to ask them to back off. Then I'll give them a moment to see what they do. If they don't take the hint, I start slowing down until one of two things happens: they realize I'm not going to be a pushover and they back off, or, I match the speed to their following distance since they refuse to match their following distance to the speed. I'm not trying to replace one tyrant with another, so if they get the message and stop tailgating me I will speed up again.
A dumbass in a Camaro once crossed a double yellow on a blind curve to pass me when I was doing that.
We do have schools in which the student is allowed to drive an overpowered clunker into unsafe conditions for the purpose of practicing recovery, but they are very expensive and geared towards racers, stunt-drivers, and law enforcement. They're not for teaching teenagers how to avoid crashes.
And that's exactly the problem! If all drivers took classes like that, the roads would be safer.
Virtually driving in a classroom or on otherwise carefully-controlled conditions will not fully prepare anybody for the stress of a likely imminent crash. It's like assuming that you'll never lose your cool in an Iraqi battlefield just because you played FPS and paintballs your entire life.
Well, if training under controlled conditions is futile, then we might as well ship those soldiers straight from the recruiting office to the battlefield! But that's clearly not the case, so you're wrong.
(By the way, I think the parent was talking about practicing in real cars on a skidpad, not virtual cars in a simulator.)
So what happens if you try to go over the speed limit, and then try to take one of the offramps or turns?
You'll likely be perfectly fine, since the posted speed limit either 5 or 10 mph less than the actual design speed of the road (5 if the design speed is less than 45 mph, 10 if the design speed is 45 mph or higher).
Moreover, the design speed can be based on several things, such as vehicle traction or sight distances (which corresponds to reaction time). And that speed is calculated using the lowest common denominator (e.g. a loaded Semi driven by a drunk, blind old lady -- I exaggerate, but you get the idea). A normal driver -- a young-to-middle-aged person in a modern sedan, for example -- can exceed the design speed somewhat while still driving safely.
Speeding is stupid, and is always dangerous. Yes, on a 75MPH highway everyone might be doing 80, but the idiot doing 95-100, dangerously merging and trying to get in front of traffic is an accident waiting to happen.
The problem is the "dangerously merging" and "trying to get in front of traffic" (by which you mean, making unsafe lane changes) aspects, not the speeding. It would be perfectly fine if he were instead doing that 95-100 in a clear lane (or a lane that was populated with other cars also doing 95-100, and following each other at a safe distance) and not weaving. This is why the German autobahn is safe (I believe it's more safe than American interstates, but I can't find a source to back that claim up).
(And yes, I am a civil engineer, albeit not yet professionally licensed.)
I don't think a snapshot camera would work the way you think, because there are limitations to GPS. For instance, keeping the thing off and in your pocket at the ready will not give you a GPS signal. It takes at least a few seconds and typically a few minutes to get satellite signals, and probably won't work at all in a city where you are likely to be playing the bit of tourist.
Is there any fundamental reason why these problems couldn't be overcome with sufficiently good engineering? They're already sort of solved for phones (using assisted GPS); maybe I should be asking for a phone with a better camera UI instead...
Is more people take public transit, it'll make more money and thus be able to get better. If everyone insists on owning a car, it should be no surprise that public transit bites.
Yes, you understand MARTA's predicament perfectly.
It is probably a net loss for the government and thus they've no interest in building it out.
In the case of MARTA, it's even worse: the operating budget is further hamstrung because 50% of the funds have to be reserved for capital expansion. In other words, MARTA is being forced to cut bus routes because the funds it needs to pay for drivers and maintenance are reserved for building more subways, which it can't afford to do anyway. This is part of the legacy of Georgia's most famously racist politician, Lestor Maddox, who came up with the idea. Incidentally, there was an op-ed piece about finally fixing that in the paper today.
Ricoh, and the few others I have seen, are doing it wrong: the bulky, almost-SLR high-end cameras are the ones that would benefit from this least. What really needs GPS are the relatively cheap point-and-shoots (like mine) that are designed to be carried around everywhere, even when you don't have anything else. Camera phones would be okay too, except that they generally don't have a good enough user interface to get the shot when speed is of the essence.
Also, not having to match time stamps is a big deal, for me at least. It means only having to deal with one device (and one battery) instead of two, not having to spend time later, having the tagged pictures instantly available (in case I want to do something with them before I get home), etc. And it both maximizes accuracy (since the location reading is taken at the time of the shot there's no interpolation) and battery life (no readings are taken when not also taking a picture).
By the way, keep in mind that I'm not talking about some sort of hybrid device, where you'd be using the thing to navigate. I'm talking about adding the most bare-bones GPS functionality possible, where it just take a latitude and longitude (and maybe elevation, if possible) and sticks it in the picture's metadata. No routing, no UI, no maps, nothing else.
(this was one of the "freeway underpass" sections with plenty of room to get moving before an eastbound car would hit a northbound car, and some genius apparently tried to "synchronize" the lights so that the eastbound green lit up while northbound still had a yellow)
The intersection in question, in case you are interested or want to claim I'm 'lying' about this, is I-45 at Almeda-Genoa in Houston TX.
The reason the lights were synchronized in that way is that it's actually two separate intersections, one on each side of the underpass. It's actually a 'tight diamond' interchange, and even though the first intersection turned green for eastbound while the second intersection was still on yellow for northbound, the second intersection should still have been red for eastbound at that time. (Your complaint would be valid if it were a SPUI, but it isn't.)
Screw uninsured motorists, IMO. If you can't afford compulsory insurance, you can't afford to drive, period. Take the bus.
While I agree, that's easier said than done in some places. Take a look at the Gwinnett County, GA bus system. (Sorry, I looked for an overall map showing all routes at once but couldn't find one.) Now, imagine you live in Snellville. What bus would you take, pray tell?
And keep in mind that this is not a rural area. It's a suburb of Atlanta with a fairly large overall population, very heavy traffic, and a high concentration of the sort of people (particularly illegal immigrants) who don't have car insurance.
(As an aside, the reason this situation is such a clusterfuck is that the white middle-class residents of Gwinnett have consistently voted against joining MARTA ever since the 70s, in a futile attempt to keep the black people out.)
The incidence of red-light-running didn't go down because of the cameras, it went down because a new state law went into effect this past January that lengthened the yellow light time. (Or rather, put it back to the safe value that the engineers intended, rather than the unsafe too-short value that the politicians changed it to in order to increase revenue from red-light cameras!)
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Copyright infringement (of this sort, which doesn't include making and selling a whole bunch of copies) is generally a civil offense, not a crime.
I'm just talking about competent urban planning, jackass! Things like zoning to put homes, jobs, and stores close together; using a grid street pattern with small blocks instead of a dendritic one so that people don't have to drive 5 miles out onto main roads just to get to the shopping center that their backyard backs up to; putting in normal public transportation (buses and subways); etc. Shit that places like New York City, London, and Tokyo had figured out 100 years ago, before the planners started wanking over superhighways and suburbs. See also new urbanism.
It's not that fucking hard, as long as you don't suddenly get a million Tata-owning assholes whining about traffic in New Delhi like the SUV-owning assholes do in Los Angeles!
Now, go take your defeatist hyperbole and kindly fuck off. Thanks.
No, the real question we should be asking, is "how can we arrange our cities such that people don't want cars in the future, in order to provide the same convenience and standard of living without all the harmful side effects?" America, having designed all its infrastructure for automobiles for the past 50 years, is screwed. India isn't... yet.
You know, X11 Mac apps do that. You click on the Gimp.app (for example) icon in the dock (or in /Applications), and it starts. If X11 isn't running yet, it automatically launches. And you don't have to "dump out" to anything, either -- native app windows and X app windows are on the same desktop.
The problem isn't necessarily that their homes lost value. The problem is that they made the stupid decision to get adjustable-rate mortgages and can't afford to pay since the rate went up, but can't refinance because the bank won't give them a loan for more than the property is worth. The root problem was idiots buying things they couldn't afford, but the drop in values exacerbated it.
Well no, they have "Assisted GPS" which augments the satellites with cell towers just as you mentioned in your second paragraph (except perhaps without having to enable it manually).
This is a joke, right? I honestly can't tell. : /
Are you sure you're not suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect?
(Of course, that's a stupid question because if you were, you wouldn't realize it...)
A dumbass in a Camaro once crossed a double yellow on a blind curve to pass me when I was doing that.
And that's exactly the problem! If all drivers took classes like that, the roads would be safer.
Well, if training under controlled conditions is futile, then we might as well ship those soldiers straight from the recruiting office to the battlefield! But that's clearly not the case, so you're wrong.
(By the way, I think the parent was talking about practicing in real cars on a skidpad, not virtual cars in a simulator.)
I think simply having the police actually enforce the exiting "slower traffic keep right" laws would be a better idea.
Interstates (and many other roads) are controlled-access, you know.
Ah, here's a citation for the claim that higher speed limits (or no limits) can be safer!
You'll likely be perfectly fine, since the posted speed limit either 5 or 10 mph less than the actual design speed of the road (5 if the design speed is less than 45 mph, 10 if the design speed is 45 mph or higher).
Moreover, the design speed can be based on several things, such as vehicle traction or sight distances (which corresponds to reaction time). And that speed is calculated using the lowest common denominator (e.g. a loaded Semi driven by a drunk, blind old lady -- I exaggerate, but you get the idea). A normal driver -- a young-to-middle-aged person in a modern sedan, for example -- can exceed the design speed somewhat while still driving safely.
The problem is the "dangerously merging" and "trying to get in front of traffic" (by which you mean, making unsafe lane changes) aspects, not the speeding. It would be perfectly fine if he were instead doing that 95-100 in a clear lane (or a lane that was populated with other cars also doing 95-100, and following each other at a safe distance) and not weaving. This is why the German autobahn is safe (I believe it's more safe than American interstates, but I can't find a source to back that claim up).
(And yes, I am a civil engineer, albeit not yet professionally licensed.)
Is there any fundamental reason why these problems couldn't be overcome with sufficiently good engineering? They're already sort of solved for phones (using assisted GPS); maybe I should be asking for a phone with a better camera UI instead...
Yes, you understand MARTA's predicament perfectly.
In the case of MARTA, it's even worse: the operating budget is further hamstrung because 50% of the funds have to be reserved for capital expansion. In other words, MARTA is being forced to cut bus routes because the funds it needs to pay for drivers and maintenance are reserved for building more subways, which it can't afford to do anyway. This is part of the legacy of Georgia's most famously racist politician, Lestor Maddox, who came up with the idea. Incidentally, there was an op-ed piece about finally fixing that in the paper today.
Ricoh, and the few others I have seen, are doing it wrong: the bulky, almost-SLR high-end cameras are the ones that would benefit from this least. What really needs GPS are the relatively cheap point-and-shoots (like mine) that are designed to be carried around everywhere, even when you don't have anything else. Camera phones would be okay too, except that they generally don't have a good enough user interface to get the shot when speed is of the essence.
Also, not having to match time stamps is a big deal, for me at least. It means only having to deal with one device (and one battery) instead of two, not having to spend time later, having the tagged pictures instantly available (in case I want to do something with them before I get home), etc. And it both maximizes accuracy (since the location reading is taken at the time of the shot there's no interpolation) and battery life (no readings are taken when not also taking a picture).
By the way, keep in mind that I'm not talking about some sort of hybrid device, where you'd be using the thing to navigate. I'm talking about adding the most bare-bones GPS functionality possible, where it just take a latitude and longitude (and maybe elevation, if possible) and sticks it in the picture's metadata. No routing, no UI, no maps, nothing else.
This is the intersection in question, by the way (posted link in case I want to refer to it later).
The reason the lights were synchronized in that way is that it's actually two separate intersections, one on each side of the underpass. It's actually a 'tight diamond' interchange, and even though the first intersection turned green for eastbound while the second intersection was still on yellow for northbound, the second intersection should still have been red for eastbound at that time. (Your complaint would be valid if it were a SPUI, but it isn't.)
While I agree, that's easier said than done in some places. Take a look at the Gwinnett County, GA bus system. (Sorry, I looked for an overall map showing all routes at once but couldn't find one.) Now, imagine you live in Snellville. What bus would you take, pray tell?
And keep in mind that this is not a rural area. It's a suburb of Atlanta with a fairly large overall population, very heavy traffic, and a high concentration of the sort of people (particularly illegal immigrants) who don't have car insurance.
(As an aside, the reason this situation is such a clusterfuck is that the white middle-class residents of Gwinnett have consistently voted against joining MARTA ever since the 70s, in a futile attempt to keep the black people out.)
You know, that's about the only good thing I can say about red-light cameras: since they're run completely by computer, they don't discriminate.
The real solution is to have decent public transit then, not allow selfish assholes to drive uninsured!
Of course, racists oppose public transit too (can't let the <euphemism>undesirable element</euphemism> get into the white areas of town...).
The incidence of red-light-running didn't go down because of the cameras, it went down because a new state law went into effect this past January that lengthened the yellow light time. (Or rather, put it back to the safe value that the engineers intended, rather than the unsafe too-short value that the politicians changed it to in order to increase revenue from red-light cameras!)
Yeah, but surely there's a way to stop uninsured motorists without tracking the movements (and violating the privacy) of all the law-abiding citizens!