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They have a longitudinal length that is actually halfway between standard saw cut joint widths, with a full depth joint sealant, so there are not only fewer joints but the joints are sealed better. Now, if you're comparing against asphalt, that's a 15 year product vs a 50 year product. Winter performance should be better than standard pavements, but we'll really only know once they are in the field.
Chaos Motor fucked around with this message at 06:34 on Dec 15, 2011 |
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Dec 15, 2011 06:31
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Not really a question but more of a comment/anecdote: I have a nephew that's about 11 and has been diagnosed with Asperger's. Pretty much his favorite thing to draw (as of a year ago) is major traffic intersections. Things like the PA Turnpike interchange with I-70 at Breezewood, which he's seen a bunch of times going back and forth from his home to see my parents (his grandparents) in PA. He will literally sit and draw all the lights, major signs, turn lanes; it's just really kind of... cool and weird at once. So I guess you should just be glad that there are some young people very interested in traffic engineering as a possible career. 
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Dec 15, 2011 06:47
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skaboomizzy posted:Not really a question but more of a comment/anecdote: Get a copy of OpenTTD into that kid's hands. Do it yesterday. shame on an IGA fucked around with this message at 08:06 on Dec 15, 2011 |
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Dec 15, 2011 08:03
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The Proc posted:Get a copy of OpenTTD into that kid's hands. Do it yesterday. We even have a server to play on! http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3434247
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Dec 15, 2011 09:28
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Chaos Motor posted:Well, since you mention it... That's pretty awesome! Driverless cars really are a huge step forward; 97% of accidents involve human error. It feels like progress in the field has been painfully slow in the last decade. I know Google's been pushing for it, though. The improvement in DARPA Grand Challenge performance each year is also promising. Volmarias posted:Considering how horrible ice contracting and expanding is on pavement, I'm not sure why he thinks creating roads with cracks premade is a great idea. This is an issue with all pavement. Asphalt will crack, too. I think the only pavement that's relatively immune is continuously reinforced jointless concrete pavement. Having it crack in predefined, straight lines is much less damaging to the pavement than random cracking. That's why sidewalks have grooves built into them: the thinner section in the grooves is meant to crack due to expansion / weather, and the crack stays relatively confined. skaboomizzy posted:Not really a question but more of a comment/anecdote: That kid's going to make a fantastic traffic engineer. It's one of those professions where being a little antisocial is the norm, and attention to detail really pays off.
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Dec 15, 2011 13:33
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Cichlidae posted:This is an issue with all pavement. Asphalt will crack, too. I think the only pavement that's relatively immune is continuously reinforced jointless concrete pavement. Having it crack in predefined, straight lines is much less damaging to the pavement than random cracking. That's why sidewalks have grooves built into them: the thinner section in the grooves is meant to crack due to expansion / weather, and the crack stays relatively confined. Interesting; I guess that makes some sense. So is his prefab road tile idea is actually a good one then?
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Dec 15, 2011 16:09
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less than three posted:We even have a server to play on! Oh poo poo that's still a thing. Checking that out soon.
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Dec 15, 2011 16:10
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Cichlidae posted:You could, but it'd be awfully invasive. Making phones inactive when used above a certain speed, putting a chip in them to have them shut off when within 3 feet of a steering wheel in a moving car, embedding signal blockers in the road, or photographing drivers on a random basis with the same cameras used for red-light-running and speeding.
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Dec 15, 2011 16:10
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So a thing happened in Los Angeles yesterday. Tanker truck catches on fire on the freeway underneath an overpass. Freeway was shut down and will likely be closed at minimum through the weekend but possibly longer. Traffic this morning was a mess on the alternate routes. Luckily I live no where near it! http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/local/los_angeles&id=8467993 Ever had to deal with something like this?
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Dec 15, 2011 17:30
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Man that's the worst place for a tanker fire. Contrary to lovely arm-chair 9/11 truther "engineers" the heat from a fuel fire can totally weaken metal enough to cause an overpass (or building) to fall down. It's happened a few times with some older overpasses.
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Dec 15, 2011 17:34
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Cichlidae posted:That's pretty awesome! Driverless cars really are a huge step forward; 97% of accidents involve human error. It feels like progress in the field has been painfully slow in the last decade. I know Google's been pushing for it, though. The improvement in DARPA Grand Challenge performance each year is also promising. I think a big chunk of the issue is that current systems installed in-car are incredibly expensive, and not commercially viable. Radio had the same issue too - the receivers were just as expensive as the transmitters. When they were able to simplify the design so that the receiver was cheap and the transmitter was expensive, suddenly there was a commercial model to support it, and radio adoption exploded. Google's put tons of money in it, but they readily admit they don't know how it's going to become a product. Toyota tried putting sensors in the roads in the 90's, but found that it was prohibitively expensive with technology then, and only made sense if the entire road needed replacement. That's why I like this proposal for KC - most of KC's roads need rebuilding anyway.
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Dec 15, 2011 18:19
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Chaos Motor posted:Yeah, they tried that with the whole "Drive 55" thing, and it worked... for a while. "Inattention is inattention" is a reactive statement based on the outcome. "Inattenion due to texting or being drunk or having your eyes closed" is a preventative statement to prevent undesirable outcomes. Whether or not its effective is a hard question, but the two are definitely not the same.
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Dec 15, 2011 18:45
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Wiggly posted:Ever had to deal with something like this? http://www.constructionequipmentguide.com/Crews-Reopen-Fire-Closed-I-95-in-Six-Days/4416/
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Dec 15, 2011 19:12
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Baronjutter posted:Man that's the worst place for a tanker fire. Contrary to lovely arm-chair 9/11 truther "engineers" the heat from a fuel fire can totally weaken metal enough to cause an overpass (or building) to fall down. It's happened a few times with some older overpasses. This is very similar to something that happened on I-95 in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 2004. Except the tanker truck exploded on the actual roadway of the bridge itself, not underneath. It caused the roadway to sag several feet.
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Dec 15, 2011 22:58
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Volmarias posted:Interesting; I guess that makes some sense. So is his prefab road tile idea is actually a good one then? It's got upsides and downsides. The deciding factor will be whether it's economically competitive, since so many jurisdictions only care about the low bid. smackfu posted:It's very very hard to electronically ban driver phones but allow passenger phones. Yeah, that was my point. They're invasive to the point of being infeasible, at least if you're not in a police state. Wiggly posted:Ever had to deal with something like this? Yes! It happens once every few years. I remember at least four. Once, back in the late 1990s, a tanker of jet fuel crashed underneath an overpass. I'm thinking it was in Pawtucket or southeastern Mass... The following car ignited the spilled fuel, and the ensuing conflagration nearly completely melted the bridge above. Another was in Cranston on I-95, which was the usual "fuel truck crashes into bridge pier" thing. Cars kept driving through the immense cloud of smoke enveloping the overpass. This must have been in the first half of the 2000s. The third is the above-mentioned fire in Bridgeport, which happened to be insanely lucky, since there was a temporary bridge nearby for the I-95 reconstruction project. The fourth, I read about in an NTSB incident report regarding tanker truck safety. This truck was taking a ramp, and the fuel sloshed in the tank, causing it to swerve. It ended up separating and breaking open on a bridge pier, spilling its load and igniting. The NTSB recommended putting baffles in fuel tankers afterward. Chaos Motor posted:I think a big chunk of the issue is that current systems installed in-car are incredibly expensive, and not commercially viable. Autonomous navigation is very tricky when there are non-networked cars on the road. If every other car is computer-driven, the task gets exponentially easier. I read an article some time ago about a test track, much narrower than a normal road and built alongside a freeway, that supported platoons of automated pod cars.
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Dec 15, 2011 23:11
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Cichlidae posted:Absolutely, that's what they do with drunk driving. My state misses out on millions a year in federal funding due to its lax laws. Cichlidae posted:Autonomous navigation is very tricky when there are non-networked cars on the road. If every other car is computer-driven, the task gets exponentially easier. I read an article some time ago about a test track, much narrower than a normal road and built alongside a freeway, that supported platoons of automated pod cars.
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Dec 16, 2011 05:43
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Cichlidae on the CBRD website did you ever see this? http://www.cbrd.co.uk/indepth/majorincidents/ Kind of related to the firey-post above, really!
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Dec 16, 2011 13:01
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GWBBQ posted:Is this because of the lack of open container law? Because trips to concerts are going to get a lot less fun if they ban open containers. Fight the power! It's because of lax sentences, especially for repeat offenders. thehustler posted:Cichlidae on the CBRD website did you ever see this? I'll check it out at work today!
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Dec 16, 2011 13:29
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skaboomizzy posted:Not really a question but more of a comment/anecdote: I did that at his age. I even spent two years as a civil engineering major. Now I work in finance. 
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Dec 17, 2011 15:02
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I used to sit around and draw ridiculous "floor plans" for houses.
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Dec 17, 2011 18:21
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I made levels with Worldcraft (later VLE when Valve bought them out) for Quake and HL. Then again, I suppose that's more architecture than anything. On the subject of traffic flow, is there a good game on the subject? I've got "Cities in Motion," but it really feels like it ought to be called "Unprofitable Mass Transit Systems blocking Traffic Because Drivers are Dummies"
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Dec 17, 2011 18:30
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Volmarias posted:On the subject of traffic flow, is there a good game on the subject? I've got "Cities in Motion," but it really feels like it ought to be called "Unprofitable Mass Transit Systems blocking Traffic Because Drivers are Dummies" I'll mention Simutrans again, it's heavily inspired by Transport Tycoon but still a quite different game. I suppose it is somewhat comparable to CiM in that everything has a set destination and they will make transfers to get there. Its weakness would be that it doesn't model pedestrians, and private cars are rather limited. It also works at a macro scale. Actually, the best game I can think of where working with traffic flow is a core element is SimTower.
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Dec 17, 2011 19:46
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nielsm posted:I'll mention Simutrans again, it's heavily inspired by Transport Tycoon but still a quite different game. I suppose it is somewhat comparable to CiM in that everything has a set destination and they will make transfers to get there. The build of OpenTTD posted in the thread linked above adds some of the destination stuff. It can be overwhelming to jump into the deep end of OpenTTD loaded to the gills with GRFs, even I had to turn a bunch that were included in the goon build for my single player game, and I've been playing this game for like 10 years. Volmarias posted:On the subject of traffic flow, is there a good game on the subject? I've got "Cities in Motion," but it really feels like it ought to be called "Unprofitable Mass Transit Systems blocking Traffic Because Drivers are Dummies" Step 1 build a subway, and watch the dollars come rolling in. I started a sandbox game in a city that wasn't Berlin, Helsinki, or Amsterdam, and within 10 years I had like 10 or 15 insanely profitable subway lines snaking around the map. For OpenTTD I wish there was more of a focus on cities. I'd basically like it to be combination of Cities in Motion (with it's focus on inter city transportation) and the current model of intra city transportation. I'd love a game where I could build the both the New York City subway and Metro North Railroad/Long Island Rail Road/Staten Island Railroad, all in one map. FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Dec 17, 2011 |
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Dec 17, 2011 19:58
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Volmarias posted:On the subject of traffic flow, is there a good game on the subject? SimCity4 was actually very good on a macro-scale. Not perfect by any means, but if you want to have a city of 4 million and have every person routed to/from a job, that's a great place to go. nielsm posted:Actually, the best game I can think of where working with traffic flow is a core element is SimTower. It was first built as an elevator modeler, wasn't it? I came up with some awesome elevator schemes in that game. Wish I could still play it. FISHMANPET posted:The build of OpenTTD posted in the thread linked above adds some of the destination stuff. It can be overwhelming to jump into the deep end of OpenTTD loaded to the gills with GRFs, even I had to turn a bunch that were included in the goon build for my single player game, and I've been playing this game for like 10 years. See, I just used OpenTTD to build crazy interchanges. Actually moving stuff around seemed extraneous.
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Dec 17, 2011 20:40
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Cichlidae posted:SimCity4 was actually very good on a macro-scale. Not perfect by any means, but if you want to have a city of 4 million and have every person routed to/from a job, that's a great place to go. The tremendous achilles heel is the way it handles traffic between cities; you're basically forced to only make your connections on the middle of the edge, or you'll end up with cyclic graphs of traffic as commuters go from A to B to C to D to A and you have a tiny road with a zillion cars. Otherwise SC4 is pretty awesome, I just don't like the way they poo poo it up with all the stuff from The Sims. Also, the fact that it likes to crash with machines with > 1 core  quote:See, I just used OpenTTD to build crazy interchanges. Actually moving stuff around seemed extraneous. Yeah, I like playing OpenTTD, it just gets a little boring, since the economy is actually pretty simplistic, and the graphics remain really oldschool. Simutrans is ok, but it feels like it hasn't been updated in a decade.
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Dec 17, 2011 20:43
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Cichlidae posted:It was first built as an elevator modeler, wasn't it? I came up with some awesome elevator schemes in that game. Wish I could still play it. What killed the game to me was the hard limits on number of elevators etc. If you wanted to play it today, you'd probably be best off installing a virtual machine with Windows 98 and playing it there. Volmarias posted:Simutrans is ok, but it feels like it hasn't been updated in a decade. I wonder how much market there would be for a micro-scale traffic simulator, and how hard it would be to write one 
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Dec 17, 2011 20:56
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I remember that some German university's logistical studies department had made a sim-city alike, but which was focused on traffic and mass transit. So you could build residential, commercial, etc, but the meat of the game was giving subsidies for smart cars, in-car real time traffic routing radios, that sort of thing. It was kind of neat for the time, I wonder if it ever went somewhere.
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Dec 17, 2011 21:03
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nielsm posted:alt.games.microprose.transport-tycoon Apropos of absolutely nothing, I grew up just north of Hunt Valley, MD, where MicroProse was headquartered. In the late 80s my Cub Scout troop took a trip to MicroProse headquarters - it was right before the release of F-15 Strike Eagle II - and while we were there, we ran into a fellow walking down the hall. The guy giving the tour introduced us: "This is Sid; he's one of the originals, involved in a lot of the games around here." Sid laughed, said, "Yeah, you could say that," and shook all of our hands, and then walked off. I hadn't thought of that moment until I saw the name MicroProse in your post and went to Wikipedia it to find out what they were up to these days - and discovered that when I was nine or ten years old I must have shaken hands with Sid Meier.
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Dec 18, 2011 00:41
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nielsm posted:They should have named it SimElevator, but I can't imagine that selling well at all. (It also had escalators so it would even be an inaccurate name!) Yoot Tower is the sort of sequel made around 1998 or 1999, and it runs great on Windows 7. I think it's abandonware and easily findable online.
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Dec 18, 2011 01:10
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Problem is Yoot Tower is barely functional despite the fact that it runs. Its entire economic system is borked.
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Dec 18, 2011 01:52
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Chaos Motor posted:Problem is Yoot Tower is barely functional despite the fact that it runs. Its entire economic system is borked. I'll find a way around that! Just want another hit of that sweet sweet elevator action. Yoot Tower has a lot of features that SimTower never had, too.
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Dec 18, 2011 16:01
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Chaos Motor posted:1. Who's going to enforce it? Sorry to dig this up from a few days ago but back in the day, both the triple-A and insurance companies used to fund many more driver education and enforcement programs. Enforcement is always the more expensive option than education. The ideal method is to have intense minimum education as a requirement for licensure nationwide. It wouldn't hurt to have requirements for retesting either after certain number of accidents or after certain number of years. The results would be very noticeable.
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Dec 18, 2011 19:39
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Besesoth posted:I hadn't thought of that moment until I saw the name MicroProse in your post and went to Wikipedia it to find out what they were up to these days - and discovered that when I was nine or ten years old I must have shaken hands with Sid Meier. Man, Sid's definitely on my list of top ten people I'd like to meet. I get the feeling he's a traffic engineer at heart.
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Dec 19, 2011 01:32
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SimCity 4 has something called the Network Addon Mod which is absolutely essential. It adds a whole bunch of additional features and fixes the traffic model as much as is possible, so you can have people commuting by rail or highway across multiple cities and whatnot. Huge improvement. There are also add-ons for the mod that give you different highways, high-speed rail, and a couple other bits. It's the best if you want traffic simulation and city stuff instead of a pure traffic simulator like OpenTTD.
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Dec 20, 2011 04:05
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I have a question for the OP. How do you reconcile this:  With being in the same area as this:  I'm a geology student, but only pretty early in my studies, and we've been discussing the amount of energy released in an earthquake. Does a 7.x earthquake just pancake that entire complex?
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Dec 21, 2011 06:48
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Memento1979 posted:I have a question for the OP. How do you reconcile this: California has the strictest seismic building codes in the country, and we have a lot of ways of getting around earthquakes. One thing that's been incorporated in all steel construction nationwide is tighter rebar spacing in concrete columns. Bridge decks can be made to "float" atop the substructure, so even if the piers move violently, the deck can stay up. There are foundations that essentially do the same thing for the entire structure. I haven't taken a seismic class, so I don't know too much on the subject, but suffice it to say, we plan for it. Seismic loads are just another load case included in our designs, increased with a factor of safety just to be sure.
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Dec 21, 2011 13:34
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Cichlidae posted:Yes! It happens once every few years. I remember at least four. There was also one on 287 in westchester in 1994. quote:On July 27, 1994, a propane truck crashed into an overpass on the Cross-Westchester Expressway in White Plains and exploded, killing the driver. The fire from the explosion spread into adjacent neighborhoods and injured 23 people.
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Dec 21, 2011 17:50
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Cichlidae, can you tell something about how capacity increases as you increase the number of lanes on a road? I can imagine the capacity increase depends a lot on congestion. Also, to what extent does the width of individual lanes affect capacity? I thought of this on my way home tonight, passing through a motorway being increased from 2 to 3 lanes, where they have opened most of the third lane, but effectively they don't have the full width available yet, so they instead have three narrow lanes. Should that still be more efficient than two full width lanes?
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Dec 21, 2011 21:03
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Cichlidae posted:California has the strictest seismic building codes in the country, and we have a lot of ways of getting around earthquakes. One thing that's been incorporated in all steel construction nationwide is tighter rebar spacing in concrete columns. Bridge decks can be made to "float" atop the substructure, so even if the piers move violently, the deck can stay up. There are foundations that essentially do the same thing for the entire structure.
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Dec 21, 2011 22:43
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nielsm posted:Cichlidae, can you tell something about how capacity increases as you increase the number of lanes on a road? I can imagine the capacity increase depends a lot on congestion. Also, to what extent does the width of individual lanes affect capacity? Theoretically, it's a linear increase. In practice, there are diminishing returns due to a few factors. Two lanes are much better than one, because slow traffic can be passed, whereas increasing to three lanes doesn't do much more. Additionally, more lanes means more weaving, which can decrease capacity somewhat. On top of those, only the outer two lanes have shoulders, so the inner ones are more compressed. More on that below. I'd say give the first lane a nominal capacity around 2000 vph, then another 2000 for the second, 1900 for the third, 1800 for the fourth, and so on. Diminishing returns, but it's still generally worthwhile. nielsm posted:I thought of this on my way home tonight, passing through a motorway being increased from 2 to 3 lanes, where they have opened most of the third lane, but effectively they don't have the full width available yet, so they instead have three narrow lanes. Should that still be more efficient than two full width lanes? Wider lanes and shoulders results in increased freeflow speeds. While it might seem that higher speeds mean more capacity, the defining factor is really the headway between cars, which stays about the same 1.8-2 seconds regardless. What is affecting the capacity is the fact that it's in a work zone. We normally budget a capacity of 1500 vph/lane in a work zone, so you're looking at: 2 lanes, no work: 4000 vph 3 lanes, work: 4500 vph 3 lanes, no work: 5900 vph, as determined above
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Dec 21, 2011 23:03
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