Tag Archives: traffic

Flooded

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Today I stupidly tried to plow my brick through a 1/2 block long flood of water and stalled. I pushed the car about 20 yards by myself through knee deep water before jumping back in. After 5 minutes of futile starting attempts my trusty brick sparked back to life and I sputtered to higher ground to dry off. Can’t kill it.

While I didn’t get video of my ordeal, I did manage to shoot plenty of traffic near my studio. This kind of flooding has been happening for years.

Flooding in Hoboken from Stripped Nuts on Vimeo.

Traffic Cops in Pyongyang

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I imagine that Drivers Ed in North Korea includes a section on interpreting the odd signals of the counter-clockwise turning traffic cops at some intersections in Pyongyamg. See the Flickr set.

BONUS: Nothing explains the moves of this dork in Rhode Island. At least Officer Johnson’s moves somewhat resemble traffic direction for a pedestrian intersection at University of Pennsylvania.

Directing Wrecking

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“I Love Traffic” is a sweet little time waster that lets you play god by controlling traffic lights at an increasingly complex set of of intersections. It’s like a combination of Frogger and Tetris, with streets in multi-lane and multi-directional patterns, cars and trucks of differing sizes driving at different speeds, and a rapidly accumulating stack of traffic that will jam if you’re not quick enough. The best feature, though, is that no matter how many accidents you cause (like the one I did pictured above) you can always try again with the same roads; you’re not dumped at the simple starter levels.

From Armor Games via How We Drive.

The Light Was Yellow, Sir

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A few months ago I got a speeding ticket from a robot camera and was ambivalent. On one hand, I knew I was speeding and was glad not to get stopped and have a notch taken off my license. On the other hand, it sucks to get ticketed by a camera.

Red light cameras are probably more common than automatic speed traps though. theNewspaper.com has a great collection of articles examining how longer yellow light cycle times reduce accidents and violations.

For example, in Virginia in 1999 traffic engineers determined and set a safe yellow light time for an intersection on Rt. 50 at 5.5 seconds. A year later a contract for red light cameras was signed with Lockheed Martin and suddenly the county reduced the cycle time to 4 seconds. In the year it took to install the cameras there was a dramatic increase in crashes. When the cameras were eventually installed they generated steady revenue and Lockheed Martin was able to compare accident rates after installation against the artificially inflated rates of the previous year.

When Virginia increased the cycle time back to 5.5 seconds, however, average monthly violations dropped from 250 to 20. The intersections were safer, but Fairfax County wouldn’t collect nearly as much revenue.

Recently Norcross, Georgia canceled a contract with the red light company LaserCraft because revenue from tickets couldn’t support the cost of the cameras used to issue the tickets. The Georgia General Assembly had issued a bill requiring intersections with cameras to increase their yellow light times by one second. Two cameras in Norcross went from issuing fifteen tickets a day to three. Instead of generating $260k in annual citations, the city would be sinking $145k into costs associated with running the cameras.

The financial incentives for municipalities to game the system must be tremendous. At what point does the increase in safety override the benefit to the bottom line? For yellow light cameras, it’s an imperceptible fraction of a second.

Busted by Big Brother

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I got a holiday card from the District of Columbia this week. It was an automated ticket for a moving violation, running 58 MPH in a 45 MPH zone. Looks like I was speeding through the 3rd st. tunnel under the US Capitol on our trip back from Thanksgiving at my parents.

pic_moving_violation_calculation.jpg

There were 2 photos in the card, with info on the back showing how to interpret the image. They show that the pics were taken 0.2 seconds and that I’d traveled approximately 16 feet. I did the math and got this:

17 feet in 0.2 seconds = 85 feet in 1 second = 306,000 feet in 1 hour

306,000 feet / 5280 feet per mile = 57.95 MPH

Route 395 runs through DC and has a complex set of tunnels as it travels under the national mall. It’s a set of curves and hills that begs to be sped through and I remember giving the throttle a little push on that traffic-less Saturday morning. I didn’t see the flash of DC’s speed camera catching me exiting the tunnel at 13 MPH over the limit. I now know that when I see those horizontal marks on the pavement I need to slow the hell down. And I need to tint that back window ’cause I gots some junk in my trunk.

(01/28/09: The 3rd st. tunnel will now be known as the Purple Tunnel of Doom in solidarity for all the 2009 inauguration purple ticket holders who got corralled inside and missed the event. Epic fail.)

pic_moving_map3.jpgI’ve heard of red-light cameras used to catch people running lights but never heard of speed cameras. The red-light cameras usually shoot from the front and can get an identifiable shot of the driver. Since the shot of my car was from behind I’m being billed as the owner of the car, not the violator, so the ticket isn’t going on my record and I’m not getting any points off my license. It’s almost like a parking ticket, although I wonder if my insurance company will get any record.

There has been some dispute about how red-light cameras are implemented. Some jurisdictions have been accused of shortening the yellow light cycle to raise revenue. Ironically, Dallas’ red-light cameras were so effective that people stopped running reds, and now they don’t get enough revenue to keep the cameras maintained.

I’m not going to dispute the ticket. I know I was cooking through that tunnel. But there are plenty of stories of drivers getting pissed of at cameras and taking vengeance on the poor little buggers. A guy in the UK melted one with a welding torch. The French are shooting, painting and hammering theirs. Another dude in the UK blew a camera up, only to have the explosion trigger the shutter and catch him in the act. And Maryland residents are accusing DC of discriminating against them because they get 64% of the tickets issued from automated cameras.

There’s a couple of videos online of people trying to trick the cameras.  The guys at Mythbusters try a lane change to no avail. Top Gear was only able to beat it by going 177MPH in a TVR Tuscan S.

00022ce8-68e2-1399-8a420c01ac1bf814-1.jpgThe best story is of these 4 hoons getting their mugs shot on a speed camera in the UK. They had just stolen the car and got their pic taken as they sped off on their joy-ride. They assumed since it wasn’t their car they couldn’t be connected to the license plate number. The car was found torched and the cops found one of the 16 year olds. It mustn’t have taken long for them to find the others after this shot was published in the local paper.