Road Marker Marks You 731
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.
Just make them cheap enough? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh shit (Score:2, Insightful)
Preemptively taken care of: from the in-soviet-russia dept
Not for us! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Just make them cheap enough? (Score:3, Insightful)
One problem: (Score:3, Insightful)
A ./ first? (Score:3, Insightful)
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. :-)
Don't ticket me - control my car's max speed (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Won't work in many parts of the North (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, figure out how to do all that in a paint and then you're a kabillionair!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
sorry but... (Score:5, Insightful)
My reaction (Score:3, Insightful)
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"?
RFID tags in tires (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Article Text (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Just make them cheap enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:lit lanes ? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Oh shit (Score:5, Insightful)
The big question is costs.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Don't ticket me - control my car's max speed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Shades of Orwell (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Don't ticket me - control my car's max speed (Score:4, Insightful)
There are times when going over the speedlimit not only legal, but done for saftey reasons. Passing another car on a two lane highway is one case where it's perfectly acceptable to go 10 or 15mph over the posted limit depending on the state's local laws. Even smaller towns near where I live who depend on speeding tickets for income when I told the judge I was passing a truck halling rocks, he understood and threw it out.
I wouldn't object to a system where my car would understand the speed limit and beep at me if i'm going over, nor would I object to a cruse control i'm able to set at that speed, so long as I can override it for passing or other emergencies.
Score -1: Get a life (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Solar Cells v. Pollution (Score:1, Insightful)
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).
Re:Article Text (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Article Text (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Great for computer controlled driving (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Don't ticket me - control my car's max speed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Insurance go down?? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Score -1: Get a life (Score:3, Insightful)
It is fun, but unfortunately that's one reason we have to have speed limits and rules out the ass. There will always be people who don't know how to control their fun-having properly. That said, I think it is dangerous to have auto-limiting of a vehicle's speed, for various reasons. However, there is a bright spot in this sort of advancement... If the system can become smart enough, and do the actual driving for you, we'd probably be allowed to go much faster anyhow. You want speed thrills, ride a motorcycle then, because I think it would be much more difficult to get an auto-drive to work properly on a bike.
Re:One problem: (Score:3, Insightful)
(A) an impossible angle and
(B) a very thick, slanted lens relative to the camera?
That would mean making the actual optics in the cameras much more complex to compensate, not to mention the fact that with a snowplow scraping over them, the exterior surface will be in no shape to act as a lens at all. These things would be way too expensive to be viable anywhere.
Re:Insurance go down?? (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:Oh shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Or we might just move to Mexico and give everyone the finger.
Re:Insurance go down?? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
solved (Score:3, Insightful)