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Going way the hell back to the first page, you mention:Cichlidae posted:
and I gotta ask: have you been there? Because gently caress LeCorbusier. I'd read about it being a planned city, designed by prominent architects, and so I expected it to be, architecturally at least, pretty interesting and vital. I want to point out that these are three entirely different structures in different sectors of the city:    Ugh. Nothing but hideous brutalism so far as the eye can see. It's just a uniform sprawl of exposed concrete slabs joined by exposed concrete columns, all of them stained with crud and strewn with detritus. Granted, India's poor, it's beset by poverty of a scale completely unknown to anyone born into a 1st-world nation, and that explains the dirt. And there *are* some (really) nice private homes in some areas, and I suspect that they're good-looking primarily because Le Corbusier had nothing to do with them. The *traffic* flow is impressive as hell. Bajillions of people on bikes, Hero Hondas, tuk-tuks, and Tatas (usually with Ferrari badge stickers on them) ignoring lane markers and cutting each other off constantly, and there's nowhere near as much congestion as you'd expect to be caused by the chaos. One thing I saw that I liked was timers mounted on the traffic lights which would count down how much time was left on the current signal. I could see that leading to some racing, but it definitely eliminates having a stale green light surprise you with a sudden expiration. But the architecture? Man. If there's one architectural style I'd eradicate entirely, it'd be brutalism. Preferably with high exposives.
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Aug 10, 2010 20:13
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Cichlidae posted:That's it, alright! Having longer cars, I'm sure, increases queue length, but capacity is primarily a function of headway. Higher speeds and better/more aggressive drivers mean smaller headways and higher capacity. The biggest factor for roundabouts is Americans' general lack of familiarity and comfort with their operation. We hope to shrink that roundabout capacity gap to 5% over the next decade or so, but I'm sure there'll always be some lag behind Europe until our drivers education system is re-worked. The thing that bugs the hell out of me is our incredible reliance on stop signs. There are so damned many intersections where one flow of traffic should just have right-of-way and intersecting traffic should get a yield sign, it's ridiculous.
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Aug 11, 2010 02:06
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Cichlidae posted:The reason they're so common is because stop signs are generally used as traffic calming devices. Any professional will tell you that stop signs are NOT for traffic calming, and there are much better alternatives, but putting up a stop sign is cheap and gets the local residents to shut up. My favorite one was put in at a three-way intersection near my house oh, maybe 15 years ago. Main street had a tumescent 25mph speed limit, side street had very little traffic. But they put a stop sign there for just that reason. Nobody wanted it there. Local residents kept sneaking out at night, and stealing the stop sign. Township kept putting it back up. This happened three times that I know of. Then the township put it back up, and *welded* the sign to the post. Some brave soul went out there and took a torch to it, cut the stop sign off, and then bent the post over double and welded the post to itself. The township's persistance paid off in the end, and the sign eventually went up and stayed up, but it was fun for a while.
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Aug 11, 2010 03:09
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A question about merging. Click here for the full 939x609 image. That's where I-95 merges with I-476 (The Blue Route, a segment of highway that took almost 30 years to complete construction of and which is probably taught as a cautionary example in traffic engineering textbooks) outside of Philly. Ignore the two westbound lanes at the top of the screen grab, they're exit lanes. Look at the 4-lane merge below those. See how the left of the top two lanes has merge arrows painted on it? Those two lanes are the big swooping offramp from I-95N, and there are signs telling people in that lane to merge right, because the lane's ending, and merge arrows painted on the lane for hundreds of yards. But the lane doesn't actually end on the offramp, it ends at the merge, where the two lanes from I-95N mix with the two lanes from I-95S, merging first down into three and then into two lanes. Obviously and as you'd expect, this *sucks*. Nobody ever merges on the offramp, everybody waits until the last second, so this area gridlocks constantly under traffic loads that just don't justify it. Given that a) American drivers suck at merging, b) everyone knows they suck at merging, and c) traffic at a merge can be brought to a halt by a single chunderfuck doing it wrong, wouldn't it be better to actually merge the offramp traffic *on* the offramps, and force people to actually obey the "get right, dumbass, this lane is ending" control? Then you'd be bringing two lanes together into two lanes of traffic, instead of having everyone trying to merge in all directions within about 1000' of each other. For that matter, I often wonder whether it wouldn't be better for a merge area to terminate with a brick loving wall with spikes sticking out of it in the lane that's ending, rather than the hundreds of feet of widened lane that lane-jumpers roar down and try to edge out merging traffic on.
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Aug 20, 2010 15:43
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grover posted:
What you should do is avoid the areas where everyone's stopped trying to force their way in. The two lanes on the right are merging into each other, *and* merging into the right lane of the pair on the left at the same time. gently caress that, you don't want to be there, you get in the left lane and avoid that mess. Then then the two lanes of the left pair merge together, which is another mini-parking lot, so now you get into the right lane and avoid *that* mess. At worst, it takes three minutes to get through. If you actually try to merge into any of the areas where people are merging, you're hosed. I've never seen problems caused by "merging too early." It's the dipshit who, in a condition of completely open traffic low, goes down the travel lanes only to jump over onto the exit ramp at the last possible second who tends to gently caress things up for everyone.
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Aug 20, 2010 16:09
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Cichlidae posted:It's strange that they wouldn't use a different timing plan for off-peak hours. Even our relatively minor signals here usually have 3 different timing plans set up for morning peak, afternoon peak, and off-peak hours. Cycle lengths are much shorter in off-peak times to keep delays and queues low. Has there even been research done on abandoning the whole concept of a set cycle altogether and dynamically altering the signals based on detected traffic? I'm not talking about just one signal sitting there listening to the inductor loops embedded at that intersection, I'm talking about tying a network of signals together with wifi and having them keep track of the number of cars entering and leaving each intersection and signaling in order to maximize traffic flow. Seems like a very neural-net sort of optimization problem. There's one near me that pisses me off a *lot*. There's a busy intersection where you make a left onto the main road, you've got a lane with a permissive left turn lane. The cycle timing is such that if you make it through that lane after it's changed from green arrow to green, you end up at the red light at the next intersection down, which *isn't* busy, so there's no cross traffic anymore, but you still get to sit there for a couple of minutes of red while nobody approaches. And it has to do that, because if it stayed green traffic coming up the main road to the busy intersection would back up to and through the non-busy intersection. There's got to be some way to make those lights talk to each other so that areas like that aren't the cluster-fucks they are now.
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Sep 13, 2010 18:58
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Dutch Engineer posted:Mobile cranes were not allowed because they would disturb the traffic underneath the fly-over too much. Also, cranes + railway power lines = sparks all over the place. This happened on a job I worked at a bunch of years ago. I was a summer intern at PennDOT, and it was a giant rebuild of the I81/I84 interchange up by Scranton. There was a big honking transmission line running through the site, and it was supposed to have been turned off. Turned out it wasn't, and a crane got a little too close. At the time, I was sitting in my car, listening to the radio, filling out paperwork, and I heard the radio turn to static. Then I realized I could hear static outside, not just over the radio. That was the sound of the transmission line arcing to the crane before the upstream breaker tripped. Guy in the crane was okay, nobody got hurt, but that line needed repair where the arc almost burned through it. I didn't have my eyes on it when it happened, but guys said the arc jumped 6' through the air. That was a great job. Neatest part was we had to put a rail line in to go back to a quarry. I was an inspector, PennDOT doesn't have any inspection standards for a friggin' railroad. So I got to stand around for a few days and watch a railroad go in, and then say on the paperwork "Yep, they put a rail line in." The thermite welding was the coolest part.
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Sep 15, 2010 18:57
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Cichlidae posted:
Paved a stretch of road one night, and then on my way back the next night to keep on going, I ran over a woodchuck. The stripes hadn't even been laid down yet. I felt like I'd just baptized the road.
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Sep 26, 2010 20:11
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I just made it to England for a month's work. I'm okay with driving on the wrong side of the road. I'm okay with roundabouts, although I've noticed that when used frequently they completely gently caress with your sense of direction. I'm even okay with the hosed-up toilets (American toilets: the best toilets) and the lovely hotel teevee (American teevee: the best teevee). But using a single white dashed line to separate a) lanes of traffic moving in the same direction which you can freely move between and b) lanes of traffic moving in opposite directions which you should NEVER EVER move between strikes me as a remarkably stupid idea. (Yes, I know the dashes are of different lengths; this is hardly an easily-distinguished difference and is horrible UI design; it's like using the same program icon for "Send email" and "format c:")
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Oct 7, 2010 20:02
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nielsm posted:E: Also, after driving for some time (usually before you get old enough to take a driver's license That's as may be, and I know that there's a large degree of arbitrariness in line marking conventions, but it's pretty basic UI design that two entirely different functions should be easily distinguishable at first glance. Two differently-sized sorts of white dashes ain't it.
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Oct 8, 2010 12:11
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) you'll learn to distinguish the different lengths of dashes even when they're isolated. It's the ratio of dash length to space length, as well as the absolute length of the dashes; it's not hard to tell whether the dashes or the spaces are the longer, or if they're approximately equal length.
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Polsy posted:
We generally mark the curbs, and supplement with signs. Signs which have words on them, not just some cryptic symbology.
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Oct 8, 2010 12:13
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Nesnej posted:I've gotten a few odd looks from several different flatmates who had never realised that you're supposed to vacuum the back of your fridge every year or so. You mean *behind* the fridge, right? Because if you mean the inside, that's a new rule for me, too.
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Oct 26, 2010 11:37
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Cichlidae posted:There's spare room alongside the Busway to double-track up in Hartford, but the high-speed project will likely require three tracks. Why's that? More significantly, you can't run high-speed rail on freight lines, because freight rail doesn't need to be laid and maintained to the same standards that high-speed rail does. If you try to do it, to save the expense of laying high-speed track, you wind up with something like Acela; the trainsets can reach 165mph, but the condition, construction, and layout of the tracks it runs on and the overhead catenary it sucks power from mean that its average speed is barely over 70mph. The only reason it gets you there faster than regular Amtrak is that it makes fewer stops. Track laid for real high-speed trains like the TGV have much larger radii in curves, the track is supported by deeper ballast and more ties per length, concrete or metal ties instead of wood, the track alignment has to be more precise, and the track segments are more upright and are continuously welded. Even the switches are different; in regular rail, there's a point during switching where the wheel passing through the switch is unsupported, doing that on a high-speed line would be nasty and cause of lot of vibration.
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Oct 29, 2010 14:51
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Cichlidae posted:What's with the ridiculous 2-lane meandering "Parkway" running through the middle? Did they figure straight lines were boring, and that adding some curves would turn any normal boring road into a parkway of some sort? Traffic calming?
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Dec 12, 2010 20:53
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Cichlidae posted:
That's interesting, why is that? I'd expect the relationship to be more or less linear with the number of intersections; if you have two intersections along a road that's twice as many opportunities for someone to pull out without looking and get smacked as if you have one intersection; three intersections, you've got three times the opportunities. Where's the square term come from?
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Dec 14, 2010 20:05
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Cichlidae posted:Plan B is shutting down the bridge, establishing a 40-mile detour, and finishing the work in a few months instead of 3 years. This sounds so vastly superior to me, as well as a shitload more efficient in terms of overhead.
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Jan 21, 2011 16:43
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Mandalay posted:How much more does it cost to do construction at night / weekends versus during the day? Night, not so much, a night shift doesn't command greater pay than a day shift. Weekends cost more, you're probably looking at time-and-a-half for a weekend shift and double time for weekend overtime. But another issue is pissing people off. Construction noise and traffic during the working day, people are okay with it. Set up a crew near anyone's house at night and they will bitch bitch bitch to every authority they can find. Especially if you're paving and they try to pull out of their driveway over the hot fresh asphalt to be greeted by a large flagman saying NO.
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Jan 21, 2011 16:46
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Cichlidae posted:
Oooh, how can I get standing to sue other than by driving my car into the light post? Because this one right here is like a supernova every second at night.
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Apr 19, 2011 19:45
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Cichlidae posted:Yeah, they're generally turned off outside peak hours. There's really no point in metering traffic when there's no danger of the freeway breaking down. Around here, 476 just backs the gently caress up anyway and all the ramp meter does is keep traffic confined on the onramp long enough to extend the backup down onto the surface streets. It doesn't even delay the onset of gridlock on the interstate, at least not by any consistently noticeable degree. I think they're completely retarded and I want to steal a U-haul sometime and just drive around taking them out before crashing it into a bridge abutment and slipping away into the night.
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Jun 8, 2011 03:38
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Near Baltimore Pike and PA252, I think they're sticking in some new traffic light control system. Basically, this entire area is hosed up, with traffic from one light routinely backing up into the previous intersection. Now what they've done is dug narrow trenches at each intersection along this route, from corner to corner, like this:  I assume this is some different kind of sensor from the sensor loops that are usually placed within the lanes at the lights. I can't tell whether this is making things better or worse, but I can tell that the light just further east, at an intersection with two little-used side streets, now turns red a lot more when there's no cross traffic. So you get through the one intersection and than almost invariably get stopped at a red light for no apparent reason.
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Jun 15, 2011 15:41
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Arrgh. This is the stupidest loving thing I've seen in a long, long time. Take the PA Turnpike northeast extension to Wilkes-Barre. Exit the turnpike, make a left on 115 and head towards Wilkes-Barre. This is a big hill. It's fairly steep, but more importantly, it's loving long. It's also twisty. There are runaway truck ramps, the speed limit for trucks is 20mph, trucks over (I think) 30,000lbs aren't allowed on it. Every few years a big 18-wheeler tries to take it anyway and ends up over the side. This had, forever, been a 2-lane road each way. Recently, I'm not sure when, it was remarked so now it's only a one-lane road. The second lane in each direction is still there, but is constantly marked as a turn lane. This strikes me as grotesquely unsafe, or at the very least, impractical. You're coming down a miles-long hill, come around a bend, and there's a truck in front of you going 20mph. Or you're coming up the hill, and you're behind a truck, and you can't pass him even though he's grinding along at 15mph with his hazards on. And to top it off, the lane markings don't look right. It almost looks like they were painted on by hand. The turn arrows don't look as big as they should be, I don't see any reflective glass beads in the markings. It looks like the township or whatever decided to remark the road on its own and did it on the cheap, there's no way PennDOT would lay down markings that look like this. It's pretty hosed up.
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Sep 6, 2011 15:13
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Cichlidae posted:Singapore's relatively low crime rates aren't necessarily a result of their strict corporeal punishments. It's their strict spiritual punishments that really do it.
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Sep 22, 2011 21:12
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I'm not sure exactly what they were trying to do here, but I think they did it wrong:quote:London's first "shared space" road is costing nearly £800 every working day to clean while council bosses cut street cleansing elsewhere, it emerged today. Slippery road surface plus pedestrians = awesome idea.
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Feb 4, 2012 01:16
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What does MUCTD have to say about typefaces? http://www.good.is/post/can-a-font-help-a-city-make-a-comeback/ 
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Mar 5, 2012 16:26
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Volmarias posted:I'm actually curious. What are the disadvantages, aside from cost, of burying all of these lines. Difficulty hooking up new lines to customers homes (i.e. fios)? Do they have a tendency to wear through thanks to roots/creatures/etc and then get all mussed on the inside? Also difficulty in repairs. Buried lines are damaged less frequently than overhead lines, but when they do get damaged it's much more costly/difficult to repair them. So it's a choice between frequent, inexpensive repairs and rare, costly repairs, plus the much greater expense of burying everything in the first place. So basically the only way lines get buried is if you're putting in a new subdivision in an area without consistently lovely weather.
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Mar 16, 2012 16:22
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John Dough posted:My guess would be that a company pays the city to install cameras, and they then get to keep the fines. No, the city pays a private company to install and administer the camera system in exchange for a cut. The private company is the one looking at the photos and sending out the tickets, and they cut the city a portion of the ticket revenue. Which generally creates a legal mess. Okay, a private company sends me a ticket, so what? A cop didn't issue me a ticket, some monkey at "American Ticket Solutions" did, so what? So in a lot of places the ticket company needs to submit the "citations" to a cop, who signs off of them, and then if the ticket's challenged in court the cop needs to show up. But that costs the city money, and some cities are dropping the programs because the system doesn't turn a profit for them. Missouri Court rules red-light cameras are unconstitutional because of due-process issues: http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/37/3723.asp Missouri also *shortened* yellow times prior to installing cameras, based on a suggestion from a camera salesman: http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/37/3749.asp California cities abandoning cameras because it winds up costing them money instead of making them money: http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/37/3796.asp Atlanta was breaking the law with its program, as well, both by not sending the tickets by certified mail and by not setting yellow times appropriately: http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/37/3711.asp http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/27/2720.asp quote:Exceeding the minimum value by a second has decreased the desirability of running red light cameras by about 80 percent in compliant cities. (...) Traffic cameras suck.
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Jun 21, 2012 16:22
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Chaos Motor posted:Irrelevant, the officer was not a witness and is unable to verify any information. His testimony is hearsay and hearsay is not admissible. Yes, that's one of the legal difficulties with enforcing one of these tickets in court. The whole business model is predicated on people getting a ticket in the mail, not challenging it, and writing a check. Presumably fewer people challenge a ticket sent on official cop stationery with an official cop signature than one signed by Marge from Almagamated Traffic Camera Bullshit Inc.
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Jun 21, 2012 20:59
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Yay, another red-light camera program gets discontinued, this time in Pasadena:quote:City officials decided not to renew a contract with American Traffic Systems Inc. for the city's seven red-light cameras, citing a lack of enforcement from Los Angeles County courts, time wasted by Pasadena police officers and questions about the cameras' effectiveness in improving traffic safety. Not that I drive in Pasadena, it's just the principle of the thing.
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Jul 2, 2012 17:38
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Cichlidae posted:
Here is the worst one of these I've ever seen. It's merging onto I-95 northbound, south of Philly. It doesn't even look at bad, except that the lane you're merging into immediately turns into the off-ramp lane for I-476! So you've got all the northbound traffic trying to get right into the same lane that everyone's trying to merge into, which means that merging traffic comes to a complete standstill, and you're left sitting there at a dead stop trying to merge into 70+ mph traffic. And yeah, god help you if you actually know how to merge, because it's a guarantee that the guy right in front of you won't and he can be relied on to slam on his brakes while you're trying to check your blind spot. This is an example of one of those times where the state sticks up 'Merge area' signs and pretends like that fixes the problem, instead of describing it.
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Aug 27, 2012 19:58
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What's the rationale for changing from the normal "slower traffic stays in the right lane, you get in the passing lane to pass" rule to putting up signs that say "slow-as-hell trucks and buses drive in the left (passing) lane only" in construction zones? Especially if the construction zone includes a long hill, this always struck me as an awful idea.
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Sep 10, 2012 19:32
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Ah, Philly, class as always. For a while drainage grates have been disappearing from I-95, they bring a bit of money if you sell them to a I-didn't-see-anything scrap dealer but now there's a honking big hole in the road. At least 60 of these things have been stolen. They caught some of the thieves today: PennDOT contractors. http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2012/10/09/suspects-arrested-in-connection-with-grate-thefts-along-interstate-95/
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Oct 10, 2012 19:47
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