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3D crosswalk in Iceland helps slow down speeding motorists

icelandmag.visir.is

21–30 of 164 posts

Re: 3D crosswalk in Iceland helps slow down speeding motorists

#22

There is an analogy here to the slippery-slope of attention-getting ads on the Internet. Once upon a time an ad was just a static (not even animated) banner of a certain size and shape. 468x60 was one of the earliest, IIRC. Advertisers invented new formats ("skyscrapers", "xl-leaderboards", "300x250", and so on), and also they got animated, and then they started expanding outside their areas, and so on; each new ad t…

Are there any longer-term studies you could refer to?

Re: 3D crosswalk in Iceland helps slow down speeding motorists

#24
Helps to have a concept of scale here. This is a tiny town in the remote fjords in northern Iceland.

The speed is likely caused by tourists looking around and not paying attention, so grabbing their attention will probably work in this case.

Starting point in maps street view - zoom out and walk around the town for 5 min - you'll gain a better perspective on what's going on here: https://www.google.com/maps/@66.0739609,-23.1207479,3a,75y,3...

Re: 3D crosswalk in Iceland helps slow down speeding motorists

#25
post #14

There is an analogy here to the slippery-slope of attention-getting ads on the Internet. Once upon a time an ad was just a static (not even animated) banner of a certain size and shape. 468x60 was one of the earliest, IIRC. Advertisers invented new formats ("skyscrapers", "xl-leaderboards", "300x250", and so on), and also they got animated, and then they started expanding outside their areas, and so on; each new ad t…

> A year or two after a new, more intrusive format became ubiquitous, its performance would fall back to the old format's When Sweden changed driving side, that is exactly what happened. "The relatively smooth changeover saw a reduction in the number of accidents. On the day of the change, only 157 minor accidents were reported, of which only 32 involved personal injuries, with only a handful serious. On the Monday f…

This illustrates that if drivers feel less safe then they drive more safely and pay attention more.

It is one of motivations for removing all signage so drivers feel less safe permamently.

http://thecityfix.com/blog/naked-streets-without-traffic-lig...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/04/remova...

Re: 3D crosswalk in Iceland helps slow down speeding motorists

#26

There is an analogy here to the slippery-slope of attention-getting ads on the Internet. Once upon a time an ad was just a static (not even animated) banner of a certain size and shape. 468x60 was one of the earliest, IIRC. Advertisers invented new formats ("skyscrapers", "xl-leaderboards", "300x250", and so on), and also they got animated, and then they started expanding outside their areas, and so on; each new ad t…

I can personally attest to this; I commented a short while ago about how I've been conditioned to almost completely ignore huge "Download Now!" buttons and the like. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15374013

Re: 3D crosswalk in Iceland helps slow down speeding motorists

#27

There is an analogy here to the slippery-slope of attention-getting ads on the Internet. Once upon a time an ad was just a static (not even animated) banner of a certain size and shape. 468x60 was one of the earliest, IIRC. Advertisers invented new formats ("skyscrapers", "xl-leaderboards", "300x250", and so on), and also they got animated, and then they started expanding outside their areas, and so on; each new ad t…

On a route through Germany that I take with some regularity there is a passage where they have been working on the road for years now. At the entrance to the roadworks are two giant flashing triangles, those work well in full sunlight but at night I have to close my eyes or look away while passing near them or I'll be totally nightblind for the next couple of kilometers which is not a very good thing to deal with whi…

Any large bright signs at night should ideally restrict themselves to orange/red, and be of brightness appropriate to dark-adapted eyes. Even a lot of recent traffic signals have blue–green “go” lamps which are excessively bright.

The new LED car headlights (especially seen on luxury cars) are universally awful: distracting, blinding, and wreck your eyes’ adaptation. When they show up on a tall vehicle like an SUV it’s even worse.

Same goes for most LED streetlamps. Too much blue, too bright, and directly in the field of vision for drivers and pedestrians. Most new streetlamps could have their luminance reduced by half or more and have the blue part of the spectrum entirely removed and perform better at lighting the street while using significantly less energy.

For best lighting, if planners cared about quality of life or road safety, there should be more, dimmer, lamps spaced closer together, on lower lightposts, and better shielded to the sides, so that lighting would be more even instead of having some blindingly bright areas and others lost in shadow. Of course, that would defeat part of the purpose of switching to the new lights, which was to reduce the number of lights (because they could be made brighter and therefore placed high up and far apart).

Re: 3D crosswalk in Iceland helps slow down speeding motorists

#28
post #25
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A year or two after a new, more intrusive format became ubiquitous, its performance would fall back to the old format's When Sweden changed driving side, that is exactly what happened. "The relatively smooth changeover saw a reduction in the number of accidents. On the day of the change, only 157 minor accidents were reported, of which only 32 involved personal injuries, with only a handful serious. On the Monday f…

This illustrates that if drivers feel less safe then they drive more safely and pay attention more. It is one of motivations for removing all signage so drivers feel less safe permamently. http://thecityfix.com/blog/naked-streets-without-traffic-lig... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/04/remova...

I think that removing all signage would have a similar effect: short-term reduction in accidents, but then a rebound (or worse) once drivers adapt.

Re: 3D crosswalk in Iceland helps slow down speeding motorists

#29

These 3d perspective drawings are much less convincing in real life than they are in images, because in real life we have depth perception and our viewpoint is constantly moving. This only looks good from that exact viewpoint.

The article shows pictures of 5 different angles on that crosswalk, and they all seem to work.

Re: 3D crosswalk in Iceland helps slow down speeding motorists

#30
post #25
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A year or two after a new, more intrusive format became ubiquitous, its performance would fall back to the old format's When Sweden changed driving side, that is exactly what happened. "The relatively smooth changeover saw a reduction in the number of accidents. On the day of the change, only 157 minor accidents were reported, of which only 32 involved personal injuries, with only a handful serious. On the Monday f…

This illustrates that if drivers feel less safe then they drive more safely and pay attention more. It is one of motivations for removing all signage so drivers feel less safe permamently. http://thecityfix.com/blog/naked-streets-without-traffic-lig... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/04/remova...

One only has to look at huge crowded Asian cities, where signage is present but effectively ignored, to see that removing signage doesn't really help. The accident rates are just as high if not more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

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