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Quis custodiet the custard?
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There are a couple of highway junctions I have to drive through each day where 3 highways merge into one 5 lane road which then splits back into 3 different roads, one of which has a signal on it to stop traffic. All merging and lane changing takes place within a quarter mile and can happen at any speed
between 20 and 60 miles an hour depending on how badly someone wants to cross a number of lanes and how good they are at doing it.
The problem usually comes up for me when I'm merging to one of the left lanes and someone in my blind spot two lanes over and a little ways back starts to merge into the same lane. Lane markers that could tell when a car was crossing into a lane and light up both markers for that lane for 20 feet in front of the car would let me know someone was trying to get into the same lane. When no one was changing lanes the markers would stay green. This would probably be a fairly expensive traffic control aid so I'd suggest installing it only in areas where there's a lot of merging going on and a high accident rate due to that merging.
Car Talk: Out, Blind Spots, Out!
http://www.cartalk....t/features/mirrors/
Tangent: How to set up one's mirrors to significantly reduce blind spots. I actually do a version of this. Takes some getting used to, but seeing more is nice! [jutta, Sep 23 2006]
[link]
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What a very original solution! I don't see any way of making it work in practice (lights during daytime are hard to notice; problems of burying electronics in the street), but I like the concept. |
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Tactile version: Imagine tubes connecting both sides of a lane, with a bent wire running inside of the tube. The wire is a little longer than the tube. A car driving across one of the endpoints pushes the wire out at the other end. One car crossing over feels almost nothing (just pushes the other end out); two cars crossing over simultaneously feel a distinctive bump (because their wires can't go out the other end). Problems of sustain and spread can be solved with clever mechanics or by replacing the direct transmission with force feedback simulation. |
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