Moar betterer rumble strips

a friend who is in the traffic light manufacture business once told me that it is difficult to design a traffic light that can legally capture images needed for prosecution.

Huh. How long ago was that? I’d be curious to know what the issue is given that speed cameras, bus lane cameras etc are prevalent.

So, if there was one thing only that you could change in order for our car-based infrastructure to function better, what would it be? (Provide a rationale if you want.)

So we’re only allowed one change eh?

Make driverless cars the default choice then, without (or with minimal) manual control/override available.

Rationale:

Eliminate the fallible meat-sack from the control element of cars and a whole host of benefits ensue.

The traffic can manage itself, journeys and routing can be planned more efficiently, but best of all I’d imagine it would drive down the amount of cars in private ownership; if driving is no longer an “engaging” experience (i.e. it’s no longer fun to be a nobber in your M5/S5/E55) you might as well use uber to get about as pay road tax and insurance to still be driven by a computer, then I reckon more people will choose to own either no or fewer cars.

If you have fewer cars on the road, and those that there are, are being used more efficiently to ferry multiple people about, more safely (because humans aren’t in control), then our “car-based infrastructure” will probably operate betterer…

It’s 2020, we still can’t manage driverless trains and they’re on bloody rails. Driverless cars in our lifetimes is a pipe dream.

Both my current car and the previous one have various driver aids like adaptive cruise control. The number of times it’d get it wrong or otherwise shit itself, I wouldn’t be trusting a driverless car any time soon. Eg, the Octavia’s CC wouldn’t let you undertake vehicles on the motorway and would brake if there was something either directly in front of you or in a lane to your right. Unfortunately it sometimes applied the same logic on regular roads where someone was waiting to turn right and would suddenly drop anchor unless you got your foot back on the Go pedal.

It’s 2020, we still can’t manage driverless trains and they’re on bloody rails. Driverless cars in our lifetimes is a pipe dream.

I didn’t see any caveats about feasibility…

although… https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/05/nissan-self-driving-car-leaf-longest-journey

I didn’t see any caveats about feasibility…

Fair.

Huh. How long ago was that? I’d be curious to know what the issue is given that speed cameras, bus lane cameras etc are prevalent.

Speed camera – faster than permitted speed, get a photo. Number plate recognition for the naughty person.
av speed camera – time between two known points for all number plates, flag up a list of those who did it too quickly.
bus lane – photo of everybody; is the license plate on the allowed (busses and taxi) list; time stamp, is it between 8am and 6pm;

Only a guess, but you not only have to photograph/record the car driving through the junction, but also prove that the light was red at the time.
The lights at any meaningful modern junction have sensors on all the approaches and adjust the timings constantly. Only way to do this to my mind is to have the camera far enough back that the light is in shot, along with a sensor at the stop line, connected to the light. If triggered, save the second of footage before and after that instance.
Then hope that a camera, at some distance away, has sufficient resolution to pick up the reg no (and the software needs to know to ignore the reg nos of all the other cars in shot obeying the rules and stopping – remember the wide angle needed to get the light in shot)

Not impossible but far harder than speed and bus lane cameras.

That’s your view as you fly past the stationary traffic at 70mph and brake at the last second.

To everyone else they merged in turn half a mile back, probably still managing to do 50, and then the lane comes to a complete standstill to let Mr SelfImportant in his silver BMW “merge” at 5mph. This then has a knock on effect behind of the open lane backing up, making it look like it’s occupants are just being stupid, when infact they’re only stationary because the 1% who insist on bombing down to the end and forcing everyone to slow down for them.

Merge in turn doesn’t mean merge at the last f****** second.

If you don’t agree with me, have a read about what the RAC think.

https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/driving-advice/zip-merging/

(Ps. Grey Skoda)

“I would ban lorries from ever pulling out of the inside lane on motorways and dual carriageways, unless the speed of the vehicle in front of them is less than the posted speed limit by more than 20 mph.

Lorries trying to pass other lorries when one is going 62 mph and the other is going a whopping 62.5 mph seems to do more to plug up traffic on motorways than any other factor I can think of.”

But you’d be only be overtaking them by doing a massive 8mph more than they are. I don’t think it is a massive problem. Even if there’s a big queue of traffic behind the lorry for say, 30 minutes, that doesn’t mean everyone has been “held up” for 30 minutes, you’re just doing 62mph instead of 70mph, which by my maths means you’ve wasted only 3 1/2 minutes over 31 miles.

Like lots of driving complaints, there’s little justification for getting so annoyed.