41–50 of 72 posts
It's too bad that traffic signals don't make their state available via some sort of radio link. Then we could have cars that provide the driver with an optimal target speed to get through a series of intersections without stopping.
That wouldn't fly with the many cities that depend on traffic tickets for revenue.
How does that work??
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't seem immediately obvious to me. Care to explain? Incandescent lightbulbs are a time-proven technology with economies of scale behind them. They generate heat and light, which is what's required here. Seems ideal for the application.
Really? Even assuming that we absolutely need to heat up the lights to solve this problem, we only need to do it when there is enough snow on the light to be a problem, which means at most only during snowfall, realistically much less frequently than that. Even in New England during winter, you've gotta be talking under 10% of the time that this has to happen. You seriously can't come up with a better way to solve th…
Or some kind of centralized switch.
Totally doable of course, but it does make them more complicated, more expensive and less reliable.
You would need to calculate the tradeofs. It's not automatic either way.
I was in Istanbul a few months ago and the traffic was the craziest I've ever seen. It didn't really seem like anyone paid attention to the traffic signals anyway. I don't see how a new design would help fix that.
Over the past 10 years something weird happened, people started buying cars, and some people would buy more than one but as most people live in apartments in Istanbul it appears as though there are more cars on the road than there are parking spaces in some areas (I know this is the case where my in-laws live near Nisantasi).
In my experience Istanbul drivers will mostly adhere to traffic lights, but not necessarily to things like zebra crossings and road markings. The worst drivers tend to come from the countryside as they don't necessarily know the road layout and drive as though they're in a village or open countryside.
I've been told quite a few times that the only reason the fatality rate from car crashes is not as high as it should be is because for most of Istanbul it's hard to drive faster than 50kmh for any period of time.
Of course, if you really want to see what 'driving by inshallah' is like, then you need to go to Saudi Arabia. When god determines whether or not you live or die, there's no point in driving properly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, Istanbul can get a fair amount of snow precipitation during short periods of time, which is the main concern for obscuring traffic lights.
Well, last year not an inch of snow dropped in city. That short periods of snow times had long passed since the population of the city doubled in last 20 years.
It's too bad that traffic signals don't make their state available via some sort of radio link. Then we could have cars that provide the driver with an optimal target speed to get through a series of intersections without stopping.
Some cities in America have traffic-synchronized streets where a driver going a certain (indicated all along the street) speed should hit the greens every time. The problem one one street I've seen it used for is, the sign is very vague about when this system is active "during peak traffic hours" so I do not know when to go the suggested speed or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? Even assuming that we absolutely need to heat up the lights to solve this problem, we only need to do it when there is enough snow on the light to be a problem, which means at most only during snowfall, realistically much less frequently than that. Even in New England during winter, you've gotta be talking under 10% of the time that this has to happen. You seriously can't come up with a better way to solve th…
Don't forget you need some kind of snow sensor - or at least a temperature sensor. Or some kind of centralized switch. Totally doable of course, but it does make them more complicated, more expensive and less reliable. You would need to calculate the tradeofs. It's not automatic either way.
I was in Istanbul a few months ago and the traffic was the craziest I've ever seen. It didn't really seem like anyone paid attention to the traffic signals anyway. I don't see how a new design would help fix that.
Istanbul is about 3000 years old and built on 7 (some very steep, think San Fransisco steep) hills. It was never designed (if designed is a word you can use at all here) for either tall buildings or vehicles. Over the past 10 years something weird happened, people started buying cars, and some people would buy more than one but as most people live in apartments in Istanbul it appears as though there are more cars on…
And only the old Istanbul (historic peninsula) is claimed to be built on seven hills.
For example, Lebedev designed bus stops for the city of Perm with tremendous fanfare, see here: http://www.artlebedev.ru/everything/perm/bus-stop/ . There were hundreds of press articles about it, which is surely unusual for a bus stop design.
It then turned out that the bus stops could not be built with rounded corners with the specified materials (http://pics.livejournal.com/denis_galitsky/pic/000220ap/), and that lighting couldn't be connected to most of them, and that the benches are too high and narrow (http://pics.livejournal.com/denis_galitsky/pic/0001h036/ - this is called "the Lebedev pose"), and that the flat roofs are inappropriate to the climate and now look like this: http://denis-galitsky.livejournal.com/33098.html .
It doesn't help that Artemy Lebedev is a giant, giant douche nozzle - if you read Russian, you can convince yourself of this by browsing his blog.