Too many news graphics these days have typos, really
That’s not even the right shape for a school crosswalk sign.
Why do so many people get that wrong?
First impression: "This person is into the kind of stuff I don't normally care about, but they're really into it, so.."
Heh, I’d that’s a lot of people’s first impression of me.
This is probably a weird thing to ask, but how different do you think a traffic engineer's job would be if people had hovercars?
Hmm…my first thought? Since hovercars don’t make contact with the ground the way a normal automobile does, they can’t really brake hard the way a car does. That would make any sort of situation that requires a complete stop a bit tricky—red lights, stop signs, railroad crossings, etc. Even if we assume the cars can “brake” by applying reverse thrust, you’d need to give advance warning and allow plenty of room for this to be executed.
Roundabouts might be more common, since they generally don’t require a full stop—you just have to slow down enough to yield right-of-way to vehicles already in the circle. Seems like an efficient way to handle vehicles that can’t actually brake.
You’d also have to deal with the possibility of someone accidentally going off the road. Major highways in rural areas usually have a line of rumble strips down the outer edge, to catch a driver’s attention if they start to drift over the edge line. Rumble strips wouldn’t work with hovercars, for obvious reasons, so you’d have to have some other way to denote the edge of the road. I suppose you could run some sort of fence or rail along the edge, but that’s problematic on its own because, unlike rumble strips, hitting the rail would potentially do damage to the vehicle.
That’s all I can think of off the top of my head, but it’s definitely an interesting question and it could be explored in a lot more detail. I’ll probably revisit it if I think of more stuff later on.
This stuff raises some red flags
One of those funny coincidences: Just a couple days ago on IRC we were talking about traffic flaggers and I mentioned that I hadn’t actually seen a flagger in years. Then today, on the way home from the library, guess what I encountered—a work zone controlled by flaggers!
What’s more, they were doing it the old-school way. Instead of holding up the little STOP/SLOW sign, they were actually using red flags to stop traffic. I didn’t know anybody still did that.
You ever notice how the driver behind you always seems to glare at you when you’re stopped waiting for a flagger? Don’t get mad at me, man, I’m just stopped because the flagger told me to!
And don’t get mad at the flagger, either. He’s just there to protect the workers. And don’t get mad at the workers, either. It’s not their fault the road needs repaved this year. In fact, if you could just not get mad at all, that’d be preferable. That extra two minutes isn’t really going to throw off your schedule that much.
Hmm…what if you put folding stop signs at an intersection with traffic lights, but instead of locking them closed, you just held them in place with an electromagnet? Then, in the event of a power outage, the magnet would fail, and the sign would deploy automatically!
The only flaw: police officers or city workers would need to come around when the power’s restored and manually fold up the signs…but that happens with existing temporary stop signs anyway.
*sigh* I’m sure this has been done before.
A crosswalk sign post. Because I felt like it for some reason.
Easy way to drive people insane: point out that some of the signs depict the crosswalk lines and others don’t. They’ll never un-see it.
I’m looking at a map of Franklin County, Ohio from 1987 and there’s a road shown as completed that wasn’t actually completed until 2012
What the fuck
