|
Grand Fromage posted:It makes sense with English becoming/being the common language of Europe. Your options would be native language and confuse visitors, 20 languages so everybody knows, or English. Official signs in Korea are almost always in Korean and English, sometimes also Japanese. An oddity in Russia is that the word on their stop signs is also STOP, but in the Cyrillic alphabet, so it's actually written "Стоп". I'm sure there's another logic behind it, but to me they'd seem to be getting the worst of both worlds by using a word alien to locals by language and to foreigners by alphabet
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2011 04:20
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 04:48 |
|
|
nm posted:You don't have to go out and buy a bunch of trains. You don't need to hire drivers and mechanics for different vehicles. And they're more flexible, you don't have the grade restrictions (which is why SF uses busses pretty much only) and the bus can leave the busway. I always felt the main advantage is that you only need to build the busway where you have space and requirement for traffic separation - they can just use the existing road the rest of the time for no additional cost. You get all the gridlock-busting advantages of off-road light rail with none of the huge costs and burdens on the network caused by the need for rail.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2011 03:46
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:Trains are cooler. Alas...it's true. However, if you look at the Edinburgh Trams Project you might realise why, despite my love of and interest in all things rail, I'm more supportive of appropriately placed guided busways than most.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2011 03:51
|
|
|
This whole idea of dual-dual highways is new to me, coming as I do from Scotland. Are there any which use the inside one as a sort of "express" carriageway and the outside one as an "exiting" carriageway, where cars can only switch carriageways at certain points and only the outside carriageway is connected to most or all exits? Or would that just cause chaos at the switch-over points/miss the point of the entire thing completely.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 16, 2011 19:04
|
|
|
Koesj posted:We've got that stuff right here in Europe man Oh, I haven't come across any as we don't have them in Britain (as far as I know.) Still, that's pretty cool, thanks (to everybody) for the links!
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2011 14:29
|
|
|
Koesj posted:Turbo roundabouts! The most leftist of roundabouts. I love the smug feeling you get as a Brit when reading these things. "Oh, that sounds cool, I wonder what that is...oh, we already have that everywhere. Right."
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2012 19:53
|
|
|
Koesj posted:Dude I used to be able to bike down to the airport and fly to London inside an hour I've always thought it's pretty good, in the sense that a bunch of people sat down in the 60s and went "right, how do we do this properly" and seemed to do a pretty good job, rather than letting it evolve and half-standardise or whatever. What do you mean? I suppose I don't get a full experience of them cos I live in Edinburgh and don't have much cause to go to Glasgow or the south where motorways have more lanes and signs and complicated junctions and things.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2012 21:13
|
|
|
kefkafloyd posted:We've used the standalone red-light situation where you can't expect to have flagmen (or, in Massachusetts, police officers In the UK we use temporary traffic lights all over the place, although they're often controlled by someone during peak times if necessary. If they're not, it's usually a recipe for disaster.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2012 17:01
|
|
) around all the time, such as bridge replacements.
|
Cichlidae posted:If you get a bit higher than that, you can put a plaque below the sign that says "3 cars at a time." You're theoretically getting a bit less than three times the capacity, though in practice it's probably only good up to 1000 or so vph, since you're not likely to get 3 cars in every "cycle." Does this actually work? Here we use priority signs for very short, low traffic roadworks - they give one direction priority over the other - and that seems to work quite well. I don't see how for higher levels of traffic stop signs, especially ones that encourage multiple cars to go in, wouldn't just result in one direction dominating the other in the same way.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2012 18:49
|
|
|
Cichlidae posted:From what we've seen, it does indeed work. It's basically a traffic signal that lets up to 3 cars go in each direction. Of course, we've only used them in more rural, relaxed parts of the state. If we tried putting them down near NYC, I'm guessing people wouldn't be as courteous. Ah right, fair enough. I think over here it's limited to places where you have a clear view of the other side and have a lot of time to slow down so I guess it's not so much of an issue here. Plus, we don't use stop signs as much as you do I guess.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2012 19:56
|
|
|
MrBling posted:Oh hey, remember speedbump chat? Well, now there's a very literal speedtrap. I've always thought speedbumps that somehow only activated if you were actually going at above the desired speed were a good idea - especially given that I live in a neighbourhood with particularly annoying ones even if you're going under 20mph (and ones, thankfully mainly gone now, that would scrape the bottom of your car and gently caress up your wheel alignment if you do them at more than 5mph.) Assuming the impact caused by these is no worse than your average speed bump, what's the problem?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2012 16:09
|
|
|
thelightguy posted:A 6cm right-angle steel lip is more than enough to blow out a tire and dent a steel rim at speed. Would it maybe be possible to do an "inverted speedbump" which uses this system but makes the down and up bits more gradual?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 23, 2012 17:15
|
|
|
Baronjutter posted:When I was in europe I noticed many of the level crossings there had these little ~1m metal ramp things in front of the railways. When the crossing guards go down, these plates raise up so that a car trying to enter the track would hit it, but a car already on the track could drive over it, pushing it back down and letting them escape. Seemed like a pretty good idea, what with the amount of idiots trying to play chicken with trains. Sounds foolproof, doesn't it? Well, almost...
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2012 23:53
|
|
|
KozmoNaut posted:That's pretty much how they connect into longer trains. Of course, proper trains just have the driving set to one side and a corridor connection in the middle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySZtLmS59YY&t=30s
|
|
#
¿
Apr 5, 2012 15:05
|
|
|
nielsm posted:And it's certainly easier to get the attention of a pedestrian than that of a car driver. It's interesting that the physically separated bike lanes are always wider than the painted-on road bike lanes we tend to have in the UK (see http://g.co/maps/kty6h). While this might be a consequence of a general better attitude towards cyclists, I think it's more an admission that the tiny road lanes would be much to narrow to actually keep in safely if you were physically constrained within them.
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2012 02:28
|
|
|
grover posted:Know what strikes me the most about this? A lot of cars, an utter lack of any bicycles, and a lot of wasted space. How is taking 2/3 of the traffic lanes away for bicycles justified when the # of cars clearly way outnumbers the number of bicycles? Before the bike lane this road was presumably just another potential deathtrap for a cyclist - demand isn't going to explode overnight.
|
|
#
¿
May 9, 2012 12:53
|
|
|
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:Suffolk knows what's up when you have a road with no pavement and lots of bicyclists using it, give them priority over all other traffic. That's not the clearest signage I've ever seen - I imagine it's still pretty scary to be a cyclist on that road.
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2012 01:45
|
|
|
Install Gentoo posted:This is true, Europe in general is rather far behind in rail transport compared to the US: We move a hell of a lot more passengers though.
|
|
#
¿
May 11, 2012 01:22
|
|
|
Jasper Tin Neck posted:Designing mixed mode-infrastructure is extremely hard though. Passenger rail stock usually has a high top speed and a high traction/weight ratio which means it doesn't handle sharp curves well but is insensitive to gradients. Cargo rail stock on the other hand is run with as low traction/weight ratios as possible because the top speed is much less important than economy. This means that they don't care so much about sharp curves as steep gradients. Britain does it pretty well - our premier intercity passenger lines, the East and West Coast Mainlines also see dozens of freight trains a day, many of them very heavy coal trains. We achieve it using lots of passing loops where freight trains can recess to allow passenger trains past, and avoiding lines at difficult locations like busy stations. Sometimes these lines are dedicated to freight, but sometimes they're just less frequent and slower passenger lines. I think this approach is pretty much the same as the rest of Europe's, though our volumes of passengers and freight per track mile tend to be higher I think.
|
|
#
¿
May 13, 2012 13:03
|
|
|
Cichlidae posted:That's how France does it: the LGV are completely separate, except within cities, where the TGV operates at low speed. Meanwhile, within the Chunnel and across the Manche, the track is already pretty much at capacity. Has England's 1st high speed line helped much with that? Actually only roughly half of the passenger capacity is used up in the tunnel and it's even worse for freight - only 10% of paths are actually used by trains. There's a few problems - by treaty, rail services through the tunnel cannot be subsidised, making passenger crossings particularly expensive, and the freight figures fell last decade thanks to the unreliability of the British network in the post-privatisation era (fortunately the track owner was renationalised a few years ago and things are now looking up.) Also, there's loading gauge issues - mainland European trains are generally too big for the British network, which means you have to use either specially designed or British wagons for the journey, which is presumably wasteful if a lot of your journey is through the continental network. The Channel Tunnel has actually been disappointing in the long run in a lot of respects, and there's a few investigations going on as to what went wrong. It's being opened to other passenger operators like Deutsche Bahn soonish though, which might improve things and mean there's a few more destinations for passengers using the Tunnel. HS1 - the high-speed line from the tunnel to London - is also underutilised: I don't think the line's running anything close to capacity and passenger numbers are lower than expected. Freight's just started running however - as the line is built to the Continental loading gauge freight can make it to the depot near London before goods are transhipped to British wagons. Jonnty fucked around with this message at 09:48 on May 14, 2012 |
|
#
¿
May 14, 2012 09:46
|
|
|
Cichlidae posted:It means stop if your car is yellow! Yes, the HS1 has passing loops to allow passenger trains to overtake. Otherwise, a freight train would effectively render the line useless for most of its passage along the line. They only started using it for freight very recently, and there's only two flows at the moment with a third on the way, so I can't imagine it's restricting capacity in any significant way, especially given the disappointing passenger figures. The original line wasn't so much a "line" as a route through the southern England railway network as far as I'm aware, so the bits used for freight will be just as suitable for it as anywhere else, and possibly specially cleared for higher containers. quote:I doubt it, lines built to LGV standards have no provision for non-high speed passenger traffic. The only exception is the channel tunnel itself, which is not LGV. Nor is HS1, which is British.
|
|
#
¿
May 14, 2012 13:19
|
|
|
PkerUNO posted:Right, but it uses the TGV repere markers and in-cab signalling too, I thought it was built to those standards. It does use TVM signalling (so does the Channel Tunnel) and is probably very similar to French high speed lines most other respects just for the sake of standardisation, but definitely has freight loops.
|
|
#
¿
May 14, 2012 14:29
|
|
|
Midget Fist posted:You are such a tool. Maybe people would like to live in a neighbourhood where there isn't the constant threat of children and animals being run over and killed by some idiot driver thinking it's cool to speed down a residential neighbourhood because driving fast makes him feel like a big man. This is the guy whose solution to every road which is dangerous to cyclists is "just ban the cyclists!!" I wouldn't count on him having any sympathy towards people who don't submit to The Almighty Car unfortunately.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 16, 2012 08:51
|
|
|
Install Gentoo posted:Trains do however run on opposite sides in the UK versus continental Europe, and there's switches and such for them to change sides on both ends of the tunnel. Actually, European trains tend to drive on the left as railways are a British import - this includes the TGV lines with which the Eurotunnel interfaces.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 9, 2012 19:09
|
|
|
Cichlidae posted:Let's talk about recessed pavement markings How do you avoid edges and corners of these recesses becoming a nice place for cracks and potholes to form from?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 26, 2012 07:47
|
|
|
John Dough posted:The Netherlands has started using section control on the A2. Cars are photographed when passing under a portal entering the section of highway, and is photographed again exiting it. If the time in between is less than the distance divided by the maximum speed, then you have speeded and get fined. We have this used in the UK to protect roadworks. I think they've used it permanently in England but I've only ever seen it used for temporary limits in Scotland - perhaps they don't want to risk it being got rid of thanks to driver anger so are careful about using it only when absolutely necessary - cos it really does work very well. Incidentally normal speed cameras here take two pictures at a fixed interval and need markings on the road so the speed can be worked out - here's an example http://goo.gl/maps/bSTnf You also see those lines near places where police cars park with their speedguns so that they can issue fines legally too.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2012 10:46
|
|
|
Cichlidae posted:My biggest problem with automated speed enforcement is that, if tickets are being given out much more frequently, the fines need to be reduced correspondingly. That $450 speeding ticket I get from a cop is, in part, to compensate for the thousands of miles I've driven over the speed limit where I didn't get caught. If everyone is getting a ticket every time they speed, it should be much lower. Here in the UK the real threat of getting caught speeding is not the fine but the three points you get on your license. Get 12 and you're automatically disqualified from driving for a while.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2012 15:21
|
|
|
GWBBQ posted:
I know what you're talking about but I've never seen a vandalised camera in reality (to the best of my knowledge.) I don't think it was ever a particularly serious problem, and I've not seen it come up in ages. But it might be that I just live in the wrong place, I dunno.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2012 07:26
|
|
|
Cichlidae posted:I would get a tour of the abandoned subway tunnels. Yeah we have that here too - I don't know how popular they are now or whether they're still legal but we also had speed camera detectors which I think detected the radar they used in advance. Interestingly, as far as I know they're actually illegal in France.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2012 20:29
|
|
|
grillster posted:Reducing unnecessary stopping, waiting and driving away means less energy used driving. A car cruising through an intersection at 40 MPH at 3 AM put up against the same car slowing to wait for a signal will have covered the same distance more efficiently. I hope these junctions people are cruising through at 40 have absolutely incredible visibility but yeah, there must be a fairly sizeable effect on emissions.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 14, 2012 07:32
|
|
|
SurgicalOntologist posted:Speaking of uncontrolled 4-way stops, it reminded of these intersections in Tacoma, WA: Looks like a half-hearted mini-roundabout to me. If you they were actually a "thing" in the US it probably wouldn't be a problem.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 18, 2012 15:35
|
|
|
Okan170 posted:If those examples are mini roundabouts, then what is this thing near my house? That is (or should be if it isn't) a classic mini roundabout - they tend to only be at the junction of three roads rather than four in the UK actually. The visibility looks fairly poor but I guess it slows people down.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 19, 2012 15:03
|
|
|
Hippie Hedgehog posted:Looking at the satellite pictures and Street View, there are stop lines and signals all over that circle, so I don't think it really works like a regular roundabout. Looks like the drivers in the circle would yield to traffic entering it! That is so confusing. I've not had a look at it so I don't know if it's the same, but in the UK when roundabouts become busy we do tend to signalise them. Do these carry any of the benefits of unsignalised roundabouts, or are they just a convenient way of making a junction of several roads (and obviously avoiding the cost of rebuilding everything?)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2012 14:14
|
|
|
t_violet posted:we'd see the PHBs misused (i.e. pushing the button, then running across before the cycle starts, leaving the driver annoyed at having stopped for nothing) but they've actually been well utilized and it's great that we can help provide safe access for a underserved, underpriviledged population. You get that a lot in the UK as pedestrian crossings as it's often quite easy to cross without the crossing when it's not very busy. The only mitigation for this used to be flashing amber (which sounds like your equivalent of flashing red) but now all new crossings seem to be Puffin crossings which are theoretically meant to detect walk-aways and when pedestrians have finished crossing, negating the need for flashing amber and avoiding driver annoyance. I'm not sure how well they work - they certainly don't seem to go green as soon as people have crossed but seem to do it pretty soon after, though I'm always tempted to walk reeealy slowly across one and see what happens. The walk-off stuff I'm not sure about - I think I've only seen it completely stop when I crossed early once, though I'm not entirely sure I fully pressed the button that time, ha. Other times it's just done a very short red phase, which is pretty okay I guess. I think a problem with the sensing might be that people (me included) tend to kinda veer off diagonally towards the pavement in the direction they actually want to go, which might throw it off but I'm not sure. Have people ever come across this stuff elsewhere, and do they have any idea how effective it actually is beyond my anecdotal stuff? One thing that does annoy me, though, is that they put the red and green man (our equivalent of the don't walk/walk sign) at torso-level on your side of the road, rather than at light level on the opposite side of the road. Theoretically this is meant to encourage you to keep an a better eye on the traffic, but in my experience it does the opposite and I usually end up just looking at the state of the traffic lights when I can instead. Does anyone know a better justification for this? I suppose it's better if you're visually impaired, but that's why we have the beeper right?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2012 20:30
|
|
|
Mandalay posted:If you had to build just one or two lines first how would you do it? The stuff Varance says are legitimate concerns, but a big problem with completely circular lines is punctuality. If a train on a circle line starts becoming late, it'll delay everything behind it and never have a chance to recover any time back, destroying any possibility of sticking to a timetable. Of course, if you're running a regular metro service without any real timetable it's not too bad from a passenger point of view, but still causes "clumping" and other operational problems, particularly if there's shared track or junctions with other lines that trains need to hit at the right time to avoid holding up other trains. Circular lines cause such problems that the London Underground's Circle Line was recently reconfigured to be a sort of spiral shape, giving it a terminus like a normal line. This means passengers have to change trains on certain journeys round the circle, but has improved reliability and reduced journey times as there's now less need for recovery time built in to the timetable round the circle.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2012 13:48
|
|
|
Cichlidae posted:My intent in laying this out was not to have all trains do a full circle. You don't need 5 minute headways in the suburbs, and you'd be wasting a lot of capacity on empty cars during periods of directional flow, but I'm not sure how to fully rectify that. Clever stuff! You're right that it'd be confusing, but yeah I guess that's the beauty of high-frequency timetables. Nobody really minds having to wait five minutes to continue their journey so you can make it as complex as you like, and regular commuters will quickly become familiar with the system anyway I suppose. Varance posted:To be fair, that's any subway operation. Turnbacks and gap trains are a daily reality for any light/heavy rail operation, especially in the US post-9/11 environment. Careless person falls on tracks or leaves package in station, careless driver t-bones an LRV, etc.. Yeah, but the circle/linear distinction is mainly apparent with "routine" delays caused by things like signal failures, train faults and busy platforms. It's much easier to restrict the impact of these delays on a linear line as opposed to a circular line - in most cases, it just happens naturally through recovery time at termini. As we've seen, it's doable on a circular line too, just in a more complicated and potentially less effective way.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2012 18:10
|
|
|
Varance posted:Most signal systems these days have AI that adjusts signal timing to space out bunched vehicles automatically. Hell, the transit system I work for runs buses on a moving block system with anti-bunching measures. That still has to have an impact on journey times though right? All that stuff you mentioned in the edit sounds very clever though and probably mitigates it a lot. Unfortunately, in the UK we generally don't have any of that. As far as I know the only working moving block system we have right now is the DLR with sections of other London lines moving onto something similar soon. Incidentally, we tried to introduce it on the nation's busiest mainline (along with upgrading the maximum speed to 140mph.) Unfortunately, it was a massive failure.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2012 18:35
|
|
|
FISHMANPET posted:I don't know if we'll see any major new subway construction in our lifetimes, unless something seriously changes, either tunneling becomes a lot cheaper, or some peak oil stuff happens and city population and construction surges. London's building Crossrail and heavily upgrading Thameslink - do they count?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2012 21:30
|
|
|
Now Waterbridge has grown significantly, its somewhat inadequate connections with New Sanctum must generate dollar-signs in the eyes of hungry investors. Would an very ambitious project to build a more direct railway between the two cities through the mountains be possible at this stage? I'm thinking something like this:  It looks like it has reasonably gentle gradients and offers one (and possibly later, 2?) opportunities for connections with water-bourne cargo (along with the obvious ones at either end) though I'm not sure how useful it/they are. It could even share a terminus in New Sanctum with the existing companies! Or not... Jonnty fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Sep 30, 2012 |
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2012 23:14
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 04:48 |
|
|
The Waterbridge & New Sanctum railway company sees the most logical next step being a line from Waterbridge towards Balkany. Ideally, the line would initially diverge at the tight bend by the canal and then run over the canal and to the south of the turnpike out towards Balkany, but this would require the agreement of Volmarias to make a short distance of track within the city shared. If that isn't forthcoming, the alignment would have to be to the north of the river and face steeper gradients, but that's okay now too, right?
Jonnty fucked around with this message at 13:40 on Oct 2, 2012 |
|
#
¿
Oct 2, 2012 13:34
|
|