Tires that talk to your town about the state of roads are on the way
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Ah, I see.
So by blanket you mean e.g. the whole toll road stretch from the border to Milan, for example? I don't really remember how it was in Italy, but in general in Europe I just tend to set my cruise control to 135‑140 km/h anyway (accounting for my specific speedo undercounting a bit) and leave it at that. I probably wouldn't be offended by that, as I don't really see any actual difference from average metering on a few km stretch of a highway. All properly marked with signage, of course!
Yes, I will go quite over that while on the Autobahn if conditions and traffic allows, but that's a bit rare in my experience – plenty of (metered and rightly so!) 100 km/h stretches near the cities or roadworks, especially on the older stretches to Berlin.
Paradoxically, the last and about the only time I ever got a highway speed limit fine after average speed zone stretches became common was in Serbia. They had this nice new straight highway just built by the Chinese and unlike in Germany or whereabouts, no speed zones yet. And being in the Balkans (where the rule of law tended to be previously quite weaker, as I remember honking lorries passing me way over the speed limit in the decades prior) and the traffic was almost non‑existent, the temptation was strong. Learned my lesson from a lonely officer hiding with a radar gun under an overpass ;-)
Yes, that was my point – average speed zones still allow you to break the limit for a fraction of it "if you really must" (say an idiot going 200 is hightailing you while you were passing a truck and you just want to get out of the way so they can crash into something else), while evading a random instant fine while still keeping the average of the flow constant and near the limit. Of course, a median speed zone would have been better (sorry) ;-)
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I think in the mid to near future would-be police state's main problem will be how to sift through all the competing inputs feeding location tracking data for the same object/person at the same time.
Funny you should mention it, Serbia is precisely the spot where they now have speeding fines based on averaging relatively short stretches.
As for the quality of their highway stretches - they have always been relatively good, even when the right lane between Belgrade and Nis was mostly unusable because of the grooves the lorries dug over time. When in Serbia, you always drive fast - you're either almost home and in a rush to get there, either at the beginning of your trip and rushing to make good time
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Cue Rockwell's 1983 song:
...I'm just an average man, with an average life
I work from nine to five; hey hell, I pay the price
All I want is to be left alone in my average home
But why do I always feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone, and
I always feel like somebody's watching me
And I have no privacy...
Etc
...I'm just an average man, with an average life
I work from nine to five; hey hell, I pay the price
All I want is to be left alone in my average home
But why do I always feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone, and
I always feel like somebody's watching me
And I have no privacy...
Etc
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Exactly what I ordered.
An expensive, over engineered, proof-of-concept technology controlling my brake behavior.
Never heard that one before.
An expensive, over engineered, proof-of-concept technology controlling my brake behavior.
Never heard that one before.
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That’s exactly the plan. While we talk about these developments that nobody requested, the towns do not fix potholes at Town Hall’s door, because they got no money.
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I am more likely to be sent millions of dollars by a Nigerian price than successfully a claim reimbursement from my local government (official motto is "Because Fuck You, That's Why") for anything.
I couldn't get them to remove a large bollard that fell off one of their trucks.
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Of course those that get excited over the survellience state drool over this... that the CCP has the most interest speaks volumes.
Did you know you cant freely travel between cities in China? Having 4 sensor crammed tires spewing out wireless information would sure be useful to track people that manage to get around the traffic stations (and far harder to block or remove).
How about the road folks do their jobs? For some reason, roads in the Midwest are better than those on the coasts yet suffer infinitely more abuse each season. No need to track their fk'ing private lives to maintain them...
Besides, this is a idiotic reactive idea: "hur hur DERP! We just gonna avoid all the potholes! Hurp hurp hurp! Found another! Fix it when you can!" If your road is covered in pot holes, fire your transportation chief. They're robbing you.
Since when has Ars been getting a bit excited over this kind of expensive, intrusive garbage? Its pretty sad some people (correctly) think this tracking data can be obtained other ways already. The dofference to me is that it is trivial to shield a phone or unplug your console... now try removing all your tires... being okay with a little intrusion is okay with all intrusion. How about... none?
Did you know you cant freely travel between cities in China? Having 4 sensor crammed tires spewing out wireless information would sure be useful to track people that manage to get around the traffic stations (and far harder to block or remove).
How about the road folks do their jobs? For some reason, roads in the Midwest are better than those on the coasts yet suffer infinitely more abuse each season. No need to track their fk'ing private lives to maintain them...
Besides, this is a idiotic reactive idea: "hur hur DERP! We just gonna avoid all the potholes! Hurp hurp hurp! Found another! Fix it when you can!" If your road is covered in pot holes, fire your transportation chief. They're robbing you.
Since when has Ars been getting a bit excited over this kind of expensive, intrusive garbage? Its pretty sad some people (correctly) think this tracking data can be obtained other ways already. The dofference to me is that it is trivial to shield a phone or unplug your console... now try removing all your tires... being okay with a little intrusion is okay with all intrusion. How about... none?
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Cool, my trip there was around a decade ago, so parts of it were still pretty new. I remember most of the Belgrade ring road wasn't even finished yet, and the stretch to North Macedonia was almost like a mountain dirt road (I may be exaggerating a bit, but in my defence I got stuck behind a very slow lorry for almost a hundred km there, or at least it felt like that to me back then!)
It was my fault – the one officer that got me was right before the border crossing, safe from any rain and just a few tens of km from the nearest buregdzinica. I should have expected them! Basically my own fault from complacency ;-)As for the quality of their highway stretches - they have always been relatively good, even when the right lane between Belgrade and Nis was mostly unusable because of the grooves the lorries dug over time. When in Serbia, you always drive fast - you're either almost home and in a rush to get there, either at the beginning of your trip and rushing to make good time
But having periodically driven and hitchhiked through most of the wider Balkan and neighbouring states for almost like three decades now, the changes in the highways' quality there over all the years were quite insane. Both the EU funds and possibly Chinese funds in places like Serbia, but their whole infrastructure has improved a lot.
Heck, there was a really nice highway all the way to Sarajevo a few years back we went there in the winter (Sarajevo has some really nice winter mountaineering and hiking destinations all around it, and most of them have been pretty much cleared of mines by now – although having some recent EUFOR MAC maps of the areas does indeed help!)
It's a real pity some of the rail infrastructure hasn't received the same attention and funding, but I think that's more about internecine geopolitical and historical feuds – and railways are always more political for some reason, likely because unlike highways, they actually have to cross the border intact and at a given schedule (whereas a highway can be built from one side unilaterally).
It can seem downright "criminal" that the rail link between Montenegro and Albania was allowed to fell into disrepair, or that the Sarajevo‑Mostar line stopped at Mostar (with two trains a day) until only very recently, but quite understandable given the bloody unfortunate history of the region. But upon checking, it seems like the passenger service all the way to Ploče had resumed in 2022, though – very nice! Wasn't running when I was there before COVID.
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As cool as this is, fleets of vehicles can save a lot of money by properly managing tires.
We had one customer many years ago that by just adding a policy of checking their trucks air pressure every day would save > 1M dollars worth of tire changes.
Add to that fuel savings and lowered unexpected maintenance costs and it's a huge win.
We had one customer many years ago that by just adding a policy of checking their trucks air pressure every day would save > 1M dollars worth of tire changes.
Add to that fuel savings and lowered unexpected maintenance costs and it's a huge win.
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And yet if my wheels were stolen, somehow police would still not be able to recover them.
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I haven't a Utopia but are you suggesting I ought to change my tyres more often than I change my mattress?Jonathan M. Gitlin said:
So then the city is responsible if people crash? Leave it to the drivers to decide based on the road conditions. You're merely inventing a flimsy reason for this rubbish.Piero Misani said:
As for the hole in the road story, do we already have vehicles that check road conditions with cameras now? No? Then wouldn't it be better to equip special vehicles with high resolution cameras instead of trying to bundle this all onto consumer vehicles? Then they can run set patterns to cover all streets in a municipality instead of hoping someone with costly wheels happens to drive on any particular street. Again, backwards justification.
T_T
At that cost, it's even more logical to fit them on municipal vehicles which will be maintained regularly to keep the sensors in top condition!
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The same country where you often spot prototype Ferraris in Autostrada services between Milan and Brescia? Coincidence?
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Worse than that. At a time when we should be driving less, and at more economical speeds, thus wearing down the roads less, we find monitoring of the roads and prioritizing speed, instead of simply reducing the speed limits so that the damage done is reduced.
There's an optimal speed for ICE's for greatest fuel economy, and fast isn't it. Repairing roads to maintain speeds that are arbitrarily assigned and almost never the best fuel efficiency in the first place seems counterproductive to me.
Too long of a commute otherwise? Start building places closer to where people work. Civilization itself is unsustainable primarily because of the energy wasted getting from point A to point B. Fix that, and you reduce emissions a HELL of a lot more than you do by selling millions of EV's.
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OptimusP83
Ars Praefectus
If its government agencies, they won't be able to monetize, it. They will, however, be able to get easily hacked and lose all that data that I'm sure won't be adequately anonymized.
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All the data collection in the world will only mean that you will have a pothole map of the country in centimeter resolution if they do not actually fund fixing the infrastructure.
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In Europe, I expect those to work fairly well.
In the US, the clerk who issues you the ticket doesn't even check to make sure the license plate and vehicle on camera are actually yours. And that was before the giant push for our corporate sponsored AI-powered surveillance state built with tax-dollars secured with bribes. And there's also the whole matter of the U.S. road network being a massive pile of mistakes that can't be solved by throwing more asphalt at the problem while some jurisdictions design their roads wrong (by American standards) on purpose so they can try to supplement their taxes with traffic fines.
I wish I was exaggerating about that last part, but we have seen cases where traffic lights are given short yellow periods as red-light-cameras are installed.
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I'm obviously not the guy you're replying to - not least because they've already replied - but as this is one of my hypersensitive buttons, here you go.
I can't speak to Italy; I've only ever lived in the US, and only ever driven here and the countries of the British Isles.
So from an entirely US perspective - your comment presumes that better enforcement of speed limits is a good thing, which is an assertion I do not accept.
Not because I think people should drive faster, or I'm against speed limits. I admit I enjoy driving, and driving fast is more fun than driving slow, but speed limits demonstrably reduce automobile injuries and deaths. This is vastly more important than how much I enjoy speeding or don't. We absolutely should have speed limits.
But until we treat speed limits as laws for enforcement rather than revenue sources, I don't think improving how we nab people is a good thing. For example, there are speed cameras along I-380 through Cedar Rapids. Not that long ago, my wife got tagged by one and we got ticketed. She was speeding, no question. But the "fine" was $75 or thereabouts.
That's not a fine. That's a fee I can pay to drive faster than the plebs.
There's a town in Wisconsin - Rosendale, because there are no innocent here to protect - that sells t-shirts openly bragging about how they ticket every out-of-towner going a couple miles over. (To be clear, I don't believe it's the town itself selling the t-shirts; I think that's all local business tourist tchotchke)
There's a town northern Illinois, the name of which I can't remember - starts with an L, and it isn't Lisle; somewhere along I-88 between Davenport and I-39 - that taught me the lesson "if the police station is easily the nicest building in a small town, watch your speed."
All of this just barely maintains a facade of being in the public interest, and is quite obviously uninterested in the principle of justice. For-profit law enforcement is beyond offensive, and it infuriates me that we're all kind of OK with it.
So: when the goal of speed limit enforcement begins to be about enforcing speed limits (which would at the very least entail ensuring someone like me pays way higher fines than people who are scraping by at less than a tenth of my household income) rather than raising money, then I'll be all in favor of an average speed system. It would enforce the law fairly and pretty comprehensively (doesn't solve the "race to the gas station, hang out and munch on Fritos for twenty minutes, then race to the next timestamp" problem, but that's both solvable and not a significant problem).
As it stands, though, it's just another way to make life harder for the poor without much inconveniencing the rich.
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I'd tend to agree, but I still don't see how zone speed enforcement does that, inherently. If the US laws happen to allow them to profit from the fines, any kind of speed enforcement will be used anyway, up to a couple of guys with a radar gun next to the local donut shop. At least here, the zone enforcement is clearly delineated by signage, so that certainly helps. And yes, we've had a few accounts of local municipalities abusing their fining privileges by installing a 30 km/h speed limit and a camera in places there was no need for one. Again, that was dealt with by the laws, but I can see the concern in a multiple‑jurisdiction system like the US is, even without Trump...
But we were talking highways in the first place. Id est multi‑lane autobahns that here in Europe aren't under any small municipality's purview, no matter how close is it to them.
And yes, a perfect system would indeed take personal income into account, so as to not just be a small accounting error for the insanely rich breaking it. Some already do.
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Jurisdictionally, the US is a complete clusterfuck in ways that long predate and have nothing to do with Trump, aside from a guarantee that he won't make them better.
And I should be clear: I don't think zone speed enforcement is discriminatory as a concept. But as long as it imposes a flat fine, it is enforcing a discriminatory law. As a rule, I do not think that enforcing discriminatory laws more effectively or more universally is good.
Somewhat to one side of the zone speed enforcement question, but very much in the middle of the problem with speed enforcement in the US question, you're entirely right: as long as the law is such that the police department keeps revenue from fines, they will enforce speed limits. And that's fine, as far as that goes.
But the incentive then is to maximize per-ticket revenue, which includes a consideration of how likely the ticket is to be a) fought, and b) overturned in court.
For a), it means they are incentivized to select targets who can least afford to make a court appearance. Which income quintiles that encompasses I leave as an exercise for the reader.
For b), it means they are incentivized to select laws which they can most easily prove violations of. So speeding is heavily enforced, tailgating is never enforced. Drunk driving is heavily enforced, driving while exhausted is never enforced (though at least you might get pulled over for driving half asleep because the cop thinks you're drunk...but if you blow below the limit, you're not going to be cited).
Anyway, what this comes back around to is I'm all in favor of zone-based speed limit enforcement if it's in a system that kinda-sorta approaches being fair. That's not where we are right now (or are likely to be in any future I can even begin to convince myself is plausible).
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No disrespect and I see your view, but I'd still count that as the failure of the local system or policies, not a failure on behalf of the zone speed limit per se or whatever.
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Oh, you're completely right. I apologize - seriously - if I came across as blaming anything other than the law enforcement system in this country. It is 100% a failure of policy, law, and oversight.
But in the context of being stuck operating in that broken system, better/more enforcement is not a good thing. I'm also against better/more enforcement of drug laws, not least because they are massively discriminatory (the penalty for crack is much higher than the penalty for cocaine per effective dose, for example), even though I recognize the disaster of the heroin/opioid epidemic.
Doing a bad thing better in the name of a noble ideal is the pavement on the road to hell. On which road speed limits are photo enforced.
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I worked with someone at a mining company that did analytics on tyres (amongst other things), they didn't rely on the tyre company to do the analytics.
Giant truck tyres (really huge ones) can cost $100k, so when they're wearing 20% faster than they should it gets very expensive. They tracked everything possible and found where they could reduce speed limits to improve tyre life span, change where they drove in some cases, etc.
However, Pirelli have zero interest in improving the life of a tyre. Why would they? I'd much rather see an independent safety group doing this kind of research.
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Hoyt Axton has a song:
I'm the cop in a little bitty town
And I don't get much pay
Oh, but I caught seventeen out-of-state cars
And four of my friends today
Yeah, I let the hometwon boys go home
They paid five dollars bail
Oh, but all the drivers in the out-of-sate cars
Had to go to jail
Yeah, they hollered and they moaned, they cried and they groaned
They all swore that they'd sue
But the judge was high, and so was I
And we needed the money due
Yeah, the judge and me got a deal, you see
We split the money fair
'Cept thirty percent to the county seat
Keep the law out of our hair
And ol' Charlie's workin' out real good at down at the corner store where
The red light is. He sees them out-of-state plates two blocks away. When
They get right on top of that green light, ol' Charlie pushes that secret
Button underneath the corner drug store counter. And that yellow light only
Lasts for a tenth of a second.
Yeah, the county pays me about fourty a week
Ain't that the livin' end
If it wasn't for them tourists in them out-of-state cars
I'd have no loot to spend
But the way it stands this year so far,
I've made four hundred thou
For a high school dropout, I'm doin' fine
I'm makin' more than the president now
For a high school dropout, I'm doin' fine
I'm makin' more than the president now
So if you're drivin' down the road
And a flashin' light you see
If they're on top of a red Rolls-Royce
You can bet your boots it's me
'Cause I'm the cop in a little bitty town
And I'd sure like to see
All you drivers in them out-of-state cars
Try to get by me
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.. And Judas Priest's 1982 Electric Eye:
Up here in space
I'm looking down on you
My lasers trace
Everything you do
You think you've private lives
Think nothing of the kind
There is no true escape
I'm watching all the time
I'm made of metal
My circuits gleam
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean ...
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Oh great... more crap to hog up the 2.4GHz band and cause my music to go apeshit at every stop light.
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That is an interesting choice of onomatopoeia to illustrate your complaint about Italian speeding enforcement. Very interesting indeed.
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Seems like a good idea, but I'm pretty sure the authorities know where the potholes are (especially in the UK where they spray paint round them) but just don't fix them. (That spray paint around the pothole? It's to let the pot-hole fixers know what to fix. However, it is usually worn away before they come and spray paint it again. And still don't fix it.)
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I remember ages ago seeing a mattress advert wherein they said we should change our mattresses every four years. (As if I'd trust an advert instructing me to spend.)
Looking online today, I see 7-10, 6-10, 5-7, 10-20, 6-8.
NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth cite Consumer Reports as saying there is no time limit.
My mattress is somewhat older. Several guides online suggest one ought replace a mattress if one of several signs are noticed including "you don't sleep as well as on another mattress" as if we can easily check that.
So the joke was intended as "replace my tyres more often than every four years" but now I've gone down a duck hole with no return.
I notice wired posted a mattress article in September but although wired headlines suddenly became much better after my most recent complaint against them in a random Ars comment section, after being disappointed too many times over the years by the phenomenally dismal writing, I'm still not clicking on them. At least it's a tonally sound article idea as mattresses can include wires in.
Now the part of your comment that makes me nervous.
From
https://meincmagazine.com/information...bots-study-suggests/?comments-page=2#comments
It's a very well-liked comment with no objections!UweHalfHand said:
I have occasionally used it purely as a reference to Homer's silly quote from
This worry, and not my mattress, will keep me awake. ._.
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Hi, it looks like you just blew your tire out on a chuckhole.
Would you like some help?
Would you like some help?
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My municipality already has something better! All of the public works staff - road maintenance, garbage, etc. - while doing their normal work have a channel to report "hey, so, like, there's a dead raccoon in a 14-inch pothole that just opened up at 3rd and Main this morning". And the roads department has a triage list of where they're going to send their work crews next. Anything that's expensive (an actual resurfacing / rebuild instead of just a patch) gets put into a file for the next Council meeting where the elected reps are asked which work to prioritize within the limited budget, or if they want to approve more budget.
You don't need V2I to tell you how bad the roads are. You just need a civic worker who's there every 3 months anyway to make a 2 minute phone call if she sees something worth fixing. Or to act on the resident complaints submitted to the Public Works webpage.
Now, V2I being valuable for dynamic speed limits & traffic control? Sure, maybe. Google Maps / Waze do this, in a way, with traffic routing; if 20 people using Maps all encounter a 10 km/h traffic jam on a 90 km/h road then it'll start alerting people 5-10 minutes behind the jam of possible detour routes.
Much of that can be done with traffic cameras, though. Bad weather and a traffic jam at milepost 214 eastbound, so lower the speed limit from 110 to 80 starting at milepost 200 eastbound to give it time to clear. And so on.
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Yes, we need a re-think of urban planning in general.
No, cars do not slow down simply because you add a sign telling them to slow down. Reducing speed limits just causes a wider spread of vehicle speeds. It doesn't actually slow down traffic unless the road design is changed for a lower speed.
If you want people to respect the speed limits then you have to design the road such that the posted limit and the appropriate speed for the road are the same. Plenty of cities hang "Max 60 km/h" signs on roads designed for 90, and - lo and behold - traffic still goes 90 unless there is a cop with a radar gun sitting clearly visible.
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Definitely, but good luck with that – reducing speeds by urban planning seems to be quite a swear word in US, at least from my very limited experience (if you talking about that, of course).
Perhaps traffic calming swerve traffic islands at the entrances to the town proper would help. They do indeed seem to help here in Europe at the village level, if just a bit. A swerve island at the urban proper boundary, followed by a speed cam or even just a speed display cam without any fines. The swerve forces you to slow down to 50 km/h, while the big blinking lights showing how much over the speed limit you are going serve as another reinforcement even if there is not a fine attached.
Not really sure that would work in most US towns that are built along "stroads", of course – here we would call such towns "the highway stops" and not a town per se, but...
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Rule: One may not quote such revered gods of metal without linking the song itself. May I remind you that Judas Priest reigns alongside the great Oz himself among the overdeities of head banging in the majestic Valhalla of Metal. Judas Priest forgives you for this omission. Here, my friend, is the song:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzWXrTsjiNI&list=RDyzWXrTsjiNI&start_radio=1
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