To turn or not to turn, that is the question.
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@boomzilla said:
How do you carry all of your stuff?
Um, in a bag.
I'm sure the carrying requirements are different if you have a family, though.
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You walk 258 miles?
We have this glorious thing called Amazon.com. I walk to my front door.
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@boomzilla said:
@dhromed said:
Well at least I don't have to get in my car to drive to the nearest supermarket 258 miles away. I walk.
[b] How do you carry all of your stuff?[/b] I have two grocery stores within about a half mile of my house, but that doesn't mean I have to act like a poor person and waste my time walking there all the time.Carry--- what? Do you also use Notepad because "IDE are crutch-tools for idiots"?
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@Lorne Kates said:
@boomzilla said:
@dhromed said:
Well at least I don't have to get in my car to drive to the nearest supermarket 258 miles away. I walk.
How do you carry all of your stuff? I have two grocery stores within about a half mile of my house, but that doesn't mean I have to act like a poor person and waste my time walking there all the time.Carry--- what? Do you also use Notepad because "IDE are crutch-tools for idiots"?
You will note that I said that I don't like to act like a poor person. Using one of those would be acting like a homeless person, a subclass of poor person. However, I do keep laundry baskets in my trunk / back of the van, which make it easier to cart the stuff into the house and keep things from rolling around a lot (especially useful in the van).
Anyways, the main reason I don't use Notepad is probably that for some reason it's never installed on my machine.
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@blakeyrat said:
What the hell is up with your tiny-ass nations.
Butt size is all relative.
In this case, you may find it's not our asses that are tiny, but yours that are wide. Relatively speaking.
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Australia is one big ass, but surely the US is more like a bunch of asses that have agreed to sit under the same torso?
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@Zecc said:
Australia is one big ass, but surely the US is more like a bunch of asses that have agreed to sit under the same torso?
Originally, yes, but over the years we've become more of a giant ass with 57 cheeks.
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@Zecc said:
Also, cyclists aren't strangers to ride on the sidewalk and across crosswalks either (they're supposed to dismount in both cases). I don't really blame them. There aren't as many bycycle paths as there should be.
Regardless of your opinion that "There aren't as many bycycle paths as there should be." I do blame them, and will continue to do my best to block cyclists who have the stupidity and arrogance to ride their bikes on the pavement. If they're too scared (or lazy, or plan arrogant) to ride ON THE ROAD like they're required to, they should take public transport.
Cyclists who cross a road at pedestrian crossings (i.e. in among the pedestrians) should be euthanised for everyone else's good.
Cyclists who break red lights will with any luck be run over by an ambulance sooner or later, and if that means they clash with MY pedestrian green light while I'm crossing, I have no problem with kicking fuck out of them AND their bikes: I feel that's reasonable self-defence against a vehicle ILLEGALLY breaking a red light while I'm LEGALLY crossing the road on a green light.
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@Cad Delworth said:
Regardless of your opinion that "There aren't as many bycycle paths as there should be." I do blame them, and will continue to do my best to block cyclists who have the stupidity and arrogance to ride their bikes on the pavement. If they're too scared (or lazy, or plan arrogant) to ride ON THE ROAD like they're required to, they should take public transport.
I hate when bicyclists ride on the road. They definitely don't belong there. Get a motorcycle or get back on the damn sidewalk. We have a fairly robust amount of people walking around on sidewalks, but it's minuscule relative to the car traffic.
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@Cad Delworth said:
Regardless of your opinion that "There aren't as many bycycle paths as there should be." I do blame them, and will continue to do my best to block cyclists who have the stupidity and arrogance to ride their bikes on the pavement. If they're too scared (or lazy, or plan arrogant) to ride ON THE ROAD like they're required to, they should take public transport.
I'm a cyclist, and I hate it when I see other cyclists on the pavement (doubly so when there's a marked bicycle lane on the road).
@Cad Delworth said:Cyclists who break red lights will with any luck be run over by an ambulance sooner or later, and if that means they clash with MY pedestrian green light while I'm crossing, I have no problem with kicking fuck out of them AND their bikes: I feel that's reasonable self-defence against a vehicle ILLEGALLY breaking a red light while I'm LEGALLY crossing the road on a green light.
There was an interesting research done in the UK recently, which showed that it's actually safer for cyclists to run the red light than to wait for the green one (supposedly, their road safety agency tried to suppress the results when they found out about them). Not that I do that - I find it's often hard enough to cross at the green light since the cars that are turning often ignore you.
@boomzilla said:I hate when bicyclists ride on the road. They definitely don't belong there.
I don't know your laws, but here (in Slovenia), the cyclists are required to use the road when there's no bicycle lane (and when they do so, they're equivalent to other vehicles on the road). Only certain roads are off-limits to cyclists, and they're clearly marked as such.
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See? Not enough bicycle paths (I really want to call them cycleways btw) to please both Cad and boomzilla.
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@ender said:
@boomzilla said:
I hate when bicyclists ride on the road. They definitely don't belong there.
I don't know your laws, but here (in Slovenia), the cyclists are required to use the road when there's no bicycle lane (and when they do so, they're equivalent to other vehicles on the road). Only certain roads are off-limits to cyclists, and they're clearly marked as such.WTF!? What do laws have to do with this? If there was a law saying that you couldn't turn on your headlights at night, that wouldn't mean that headlights should be off at night.
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@blakeyrat said:
If your railroad has lockout sections, I can't even imagine there's any safety improvement to keeping the tracks unidirectional. And like I said above, unidirectional tracks don't help the situation where one train is completely stopped and another moving fast-- but lockout sections do.
True, but the safety systems involve more than just a couple of signals. In all (I think) European countries there are automatic train control systems, that stop the train in case of a SPAD (signal passed at danger). Obviously, each country has its own system (or more than one) that is completely incompatible with the neighbouring country's system, quite apart from the fact that there are at least four different systems of overhead wire voltage, AC/DC and frequency, sometimes more than one system in one country. And third rail in the UK.
Well, at least everybody runs on standard gauge (even the British, but only because they invented it, otherwise they would abhor having something identical to mainland Europe). Except Spain, Portugal, Finland, Ireland and the former Soviet Union, which have three different broad gauges between them.
Anyway, these automatic train control systems are expensive, and that's why you see unidirectional tracks on double track lines. Trains can go onto the other track, for example to overtake a stranded train, but they need to switch off the safety system, get special dispensation, etc.
The only thing I can think of is if your lockout sections are tiny (less than 10 miles) and your trains are all moving at 70 mph. Then it'd be a challenge to manage, but still no worse than the traffic controller at the average airport.
Trains run anywhere between 80 and 200 mph (in much smaller sections), although freight trains are often not faster than 50 mph. The latest thing is ETCS, where with Level 3 you have "moving blocks", where there no longer are fixed sections and each train stays its minimumg braking distance away from the train before it. There are also no more line-side signals; everything is shown in the cab.Given the delays and problems that ETCS has had, I'm pretty sure the software would make for good reading on this site.
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@blakeyrat said:
@dhromed said:
Dude, 10 miles is three stations (though express trains skip minor stations). You can't go 10 miles in any direction without hitting a city. :D
What the hell is up with your tiny-ass nations. Christ. Bulldoze some of those produnks, they obviously are obstructing efficient railroading.
Isn't a " mile" in that part of the world anywhere between 2km and 10 km?
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@boomzilla said:
You will note that I said that I don't like to act like a poor person. Using one of those would be acting like a homeless person, a subclass of poor person.
I see that the green monster has gotten to you!
@boomzilla said:
which make it easier to cart the stuff into the house
I re-purpose the transport bag when I enter my apartment building as a wheel-less cart that allows me to easily move all my groceries into the house— and I don't even have to transfer the items to it, because they're already in there.
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@Cad Delworth said:
Cyclists who cross a road at pedestrian crossings (i.e. in among the pedestrians) should be euthanised for everyone else's good.
I do that all the time, but only for one specific crossing, and not really "among pedestrians" because it's not busylike crossings in a downtown area.
It's safer and faster for me because it's a 4-lane road with a strip of grass down the middle, so I only have to take cars from one side into account.
I also never wait for green light there because if I do press the greenlight button it's just me crossing, and then I've caused a blocking of 4-5 cars which are then waiting a red light for NOBODY and I've long gone.
But for every other crossing I behave like a law-abiding citizen.
@Cad Delworth said:
I have no problem with kicking fuck out of them AND their bikes
You have anger problems and should seek psychiatric help, my friend.
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@boomzilla said:
I hate when bicyclists ride on the road. They definitely don't belong there. Get a motorcycle or get back on the damn sidewalk.
Sidewalk is for walkers. Bikes go on the road, and there should be bicycle lanes. I guess it's hard when you're not living in a cyclist nation like The Netherlands, because I assume bike lanes are fairly rare?
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@boomzilla said:
WTF!? What do laws have to do with this? If there was a law saying that you couldn't turn on your headlights at night, that wouldn't mean that headlights should be off at night.
Oh no! The green monster is messing with your capitalist pig mind! Only gibberish comes out! D:
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@Zemm said:
Isn't a " mile" in that part of the world anywhere between 2km and 10 km?
I don't kow of any myth of common misconception that would make this an operational joke. I'm sorry, your L.O.L. application is hereby denied. :|
So no, it's ~1.6km per mile, and that what I base my calculations on.
Once I happened to be in a modern train equipped with screens that displayed the train's speed, and it was 120kph, and it was a reasonably long section of track, so that's what I base my speed estimates on.
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@dhromed said:
@boomzilla said:
I hate when bicyclists ride on the road. They definitely don't belong there. Get a motorcycle or get back on the damn sidewalk.
Sidewalk is for walkers. Bikes go on the road, and there should be bicycle lanes. I guess it's hard when you're not living in a cyclist nation like The Netherlands, because I assume bike lanes are fairly rare?
Yes, if there are dedicated bike lanes, then they are welcome there, though they are still annoying at turns. They just don't mix well with cars. I think it's a rare place in the US where bike lanes are worth removing real estate from the road.
@dhromed said:
@boomzilla said:
WTF!? What do laws have to do with this? If there was a law saying that you couldn't turn on your headlights at night, that wouldn't mean that headlights should be off at night.
Oh no! The green monster is messing with your capitalist pig mind! Only gibberish comes out! D:
No, my capitalist pig mind is doing just fine. Which part of that was hard to understand? Or do you really derive your sense of right and wrong from laws?
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As far as I'm concerned, I'm ok with cyclists riding wherever they see fit as long as they don't act like jerks, which can happen anywhere.
- Cyclist whizzing past pedestrians when the street is available? Jerk!
- Cyclist leasurely pedaling among pedestrians without interfering with their safety or confort, because there are cars on the street? Not a jerk.
- Cyclist riding on the street and making cars have to deviate when there's a perfectly empty sidewalk? Annoying, even though it's the legally responsible thing to do.
- Cyclist waiting by a crosswalk without getting off the bike? Jerk, I'm not stopping for you!
- Cyclist waiting to push the bike across a crosswalk? Already, I'll stop. You can even get back on the bike as long as you don't block anyone else's path.
- Cyclist crossing the street without getting off the bike when the cars have already stopped for other people, and pedaling at about the same speed as a person would walk? Not a jerk.
- Motorcyclist riding on a sidewalk? Jerk!
- Motorcyclist parking their motorcycle on the sidewalk because there's no alternative while making a visible effort not to occupy too much space? Not a jerk.
- Motorcyclist getting off the motorcycle to push it across the crosswalk at an intersection, therefore avoiding a stop at a red light? Sneaky, and a jerk specially if they keep the engine running. Cyclist doing the same thing? Still a jerk, though not as much. I turn a blind eye to delivery guys if they manage to not interfere with both motor and pedestrian traffic, but it's still a jerk thing to do.@dhromed said:
I also never wait for green light there because if I do press the greenlight button it's just me crossing, and then I've caused a blocking of 4-5 cars which are then waiting a red light for NOBODY and I've long gone.
Not a jerk.- This guy?
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@boomzilla said:
They just don't mix well with cars.
I agree, though they don't mix well with peds either.
@boomzilla said:
Or do you really derive your sense of right and wrong from laws?
Of course I do.
Every law is wrong, and I am always right.
Not hard.
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@dhromed said:
Wow, that's a red smear on the road. Nice touch.
LOLI've also experienced another related, if a little "opposite", situation in this intersection. I was a pedestrian approaching the crosswalk coming from the "East" side of the diagram, and a driver was not about to stop for me, because I wasn't exactly jumping in front of him.
You see, a frequent cause of collisions in this intersection between W-incoming cars is that sometimes one car will break for a pedestrian crossing W<->E but one behind won't, or at least not on time. That's because not many drivers expect the green light for pedestrians to be on, even though they should since it's a turn.
Also, because both W-incoming lanes are allowed to turn N into any of 4 lanes, drivers are usually more concerned about what other cars are doing and not so much about pedestrians. It's also a rather short green light with a long waiting time, so cars that didn't already have to wait will rush before the semaphore closes. It's not really that bad, but it ends up being worse because it can catch people unprepared.
That's why I usually prefer to just let the W-incoming traffic flow and only cross when the cars are gone. I go as far as to pretend I'm waiting to cross S instead of W so the cars won't stop for me, and then cross in the time between the W semaphore closing and the E semaphore opening. E-incoming cars have to stop for me anyway, and they have better visibility/directed attention.
But I digress... so, I was approaching the NE side of the intersection while W-incoming traffic was merrily flowing in all directions and N in particular. One of the drivers at the outside of the turn visibly stopped accelerating as he saw me approaching, but you could tell he was hesitating on whether to break or not because I wasn't quite at the side of the road yet. As it looked like he wasn't going to stop (which was fine by me), a guy on a bike wooshed past me and onto the street, forcing both him and the column of cars at his left side to awkardly hit the breaks. Fortunately this didn't happen at a very high speed and all the drivers were able to break confortably in time, but there was a bit of screeching involved.
Oh, and neither of the guys in these incidents were wearing helmets or reflective gear.
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@Severity One said:
Trains run anywhere between 80 and 200 mph
WTF? Even the Shinkansen doesn't go that fast. Did you mean kph perhaps?
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@Severity One said:
Well, at least everybody runs on standard gauge (even the British, but only because they invented it, otherwise they would abhor having something identical to mainland Europe).
...track gauge, not loading gauge. Loading gauge is still different everywhere, yes?
We don't use the British loading gauge because like everything European it's FUCKING TINY AS SHIT. We can't even fit our small locomotives in British tunnels. And the Russians think our loading gauge is tiny, their's is frucking huge.
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@Zecc said:
- This guy?
Probably a foriegner to the country, confused by a red-brown-green traffic light system.
But that's still the route of a jerk. Console yourself with the thought that maintaining that behaviour will eventually mean one less jerk.
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@blakeyrat said:
@Severity One said:
Pretty much, yes. :) Although the British stuff is small even by continental European standards. And yes, it's different for most countries. And sometimes for lines inside the same country.Well, at least everybody runs on standard gauge (even the British, but only because they invented it, otherwise they would abhor having something identical to mainland Europe).
...track gauge, not loading gauge. Loading gauge is still different everywhere, yes?
We don't use the British loading gauge because like everything European it's FUCKING TINY AS SHIT. We can't even fit our small locomotives in British tunnels. And the Russians think our loading gauge is tiny, their's is frucking huge.
I forgot to mention axle load. On French high-speed lines, it's a mere 17 metric tons, but even on conventional lines, you can't run American equipment because of the axle load, even though the track gauge is the same. So the Germans are building locomotives for the American market, and they have to move them by ship to a harbour.
In Russia, everything is big. Their jet fighters are bigger, their strategic bombbers are bigger, and they had the biggest nuke: 50 Mt, which was actually the scaled down version. Which makes it all the more ironic that their president,
comradeVladimir Putin, is rather short.
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@Severity One said:
@blakeyrat said:
Wait... are you sure this still about railroads?We don't use the British loading gauge because like everything European it's FUCKING TINY AS SHIT. We can't even fit our small locomotives in British tunnels. And the Russians think our loading gauge is tiny, their's is frucking huge.
Pretty much, yes. :) Although the British stuff is small even by continental European standards.@Zecc said:
... break ... break ... breaks ... break ...
You keep using that word; I don't think it means what you think it means. Or cars (or their drivers) are a lot more fragile where you live than I am used to.
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Alright, alright... s/break/brake/gi
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@Anonymouse said:
@SeverityOne said:
Obviously. Like Blakey mentioned, the British stuff is necessarily small, because their tunnels are very small, and even the smallest American stuff won't fit in British tunnels.Pretty much, yes. :) Although the British stuff is small even by continental European standards.
Wait... are you sure this still about railroads?Er... I'll get my hat.
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@blakeyrat said:
If your railroad has lockout sections …
Absolute block signalling (single train occupancy per signal-to-signal block), mostly track circuits, a few axle counters. Unidirectional for two tracks or above (running trains in opposite directions would be impossible, as services are far too frequent), and bidirectional for single track — I forget how long a typical block is, maybe a mile or more I guess? Lineside signalling, with typically three or four aspect signals that indicate the number of clear blocks ahead (not target speed) or provide control. Speeds up to 125 MPH, except for High Speed 1, where the fastest train there does 186 MPH — a modified TGV for cross-channel services. We have faster trains, but the ruling is no travelling above 125 MPH without in-cab signalling, and we don't like investing in our railways. But then, New Zealand is worse — our British Rail Mark 4 coaches are getting old (from the 80s) and NZ just bought up all our old Mk 2 coaches … Now that's a country that really hates trains.
Bidirectional is fun owing to how AWS works — a permanent magnet (arm) followed by a signal-controlled electromagnet (trigger), that can require a manual cancel when travelling in the opposite direction where it doesn't apply. TPWS has different arm/trigger frequency pairs for nesting and bidirectional running. No idea what ATP has — for some reason, I never looked into it, and only a couple of lines have it. The new European system is being trialled in Wales. High Speed 1 uses French TVM in-cab signalling.
Captain Boring, at your service.
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@blakeyrat said:
New South Wales
BTW I agree: no. The sign outranks the painted lines-- the lines might only exist to let people know they can make a U-turn.
Plus all the markings are on the left side of the road, so it's all wrong anyway. Drive on the right like God intended!
It just goes to show how stupid all of that striping is. There should be one reflective stripe at the outside edge of the road... that's it. The rest of it is just distracting and, as we see here, often ambiguous. And how much time/petroleum are we wasting taking the inefficient route painted onto the road by some yokel? Too much, I'd say.
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@bridget99 said:
@blakeyrat said:
New South Wales
BTW I agree: no. The sign outranks the painted lines-- the lines might only exist to let people know they can make a U-turn.
Plus all the markings are on the left side of the road, so it's all wrong anyway. Drive on the right like God intended!
It just goes to show how stupid all of that striping is. There should be one reflective stripe at the outside edge of the road... that's it. The rest of it is just distracting and, as we see here, often ambiguous. And how much time/petroleum are we wasting taking the inefficient route painted onto the road by some yokel? Too much, I'd say.
Yeah. I mean, who needs the ability to have at least some idea of where the other cars are going to be. People are completely rational and will form into perfect distributions without any presure.
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@bridget99 said:
It just goes to show how stupid all of that striping is. There should be one reflective stripe at the outside edge of the road... that's it.
Overkill. Do away with everything; kerbs, roadsigns, road markings - the lot. I present the idea of "shared space" where pedestrians, cyclists and motor vehicles co-exist in the same space happily without all those distracting instructions or indications. Or not.
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Addendum:
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@ip-guru said:
The Uk drives on the left because our road nework dates back to knights on horseback.
Europeans drive on the right because Napoleon was left haned & made every one conform to his needs (& they never reverted back once we had defeated him)
I'm not looking forward to driving my (UK spec) car in France next month.....
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@ip-guru said:
Most of thre UK mainline has 4 parallel tracks with trains in each direction running on their left hand pair.
Wrong. Most of the UK does not have 4 parallel tracks on their mainlines because those cheapskate asses in London refuse to let anyone do the investment needed to restore such operations (either that or it is a section where adding it would take major investment to provide enough track width). But mainlines always have at least 2 parallel tracks so that there's no need for really complex interlocking to deal with stuff running in opposite directions. (There are still quite a few single track sections, but not on the mainlines; single track sections simply can't carry the level of traffic associated with a mainline.)
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@Daniel Beardsmore said:
The new European system is being trialled in Wales.
I met the guys developing the software for that (nice guys) and they were using some of my library code to do it. Now, I know that code very well indeed, and I'm going to say nothing other than that I plan to stick to driving when in Wales for the foreseeable future...
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@dkf said:
@Daniel Beardsmore said:
The new European system is being trialled in Wales.
I met the guys developing the software for that (nice guys) and they were using some of my library code to do it. Now, I know that code very well indeed, and I'm going to say nothing other than that I plan to stick to driving when in Wales for the foreseeable future...lol.
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@boomzilla said:
How do you carry all of your stuff? I have two grocery stores within about a half mile of my house, but that doesn't mean I have to act like a poor person and waste my time walking there all the time.
You carry it with your hands, or put it in a backpack. Seriously if you have two grocery stores within half a mile there's no reason to act like a lazy fatso. Five minutes of walking. Are you the kind of guy who puts "taking a stroll" under the "exercise" category?
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@arh said:
@boomzilla said:
How do you carry all of your stuff? I have two grocery stores within about a half mile of my house, but that doesn't mean I have to act like a poor person and waste my time walking there all the time.
You carry it with your hands, or put it in a backpack. Seriously if you have two grocery stores within half a mile there's no reason to act like a lazy fatso. Five minutes of walking. Are you the kind of guy who puts "taking a stroll" under the "exercise" category?Just because you're a depressing single person with nothing better to do than walk around your neighborhood doesn't mean the rest of us are.
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@boomzilla said:
Just because you're a depressing single person with nothing better to do than walk around your neighborhood doesn't mean the rest of us are.
Looks like you're not denying being a lazy fatso.
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@dhromed said:
@boomzilla said:
Just because you're a depressing single person with nothing better to do than walk around your neighborhood doesn't mean the rest of us are.
Looks like you're not denying being a lazy fatso.Well, duh. I hang out here, don't I?
Actually, I get plenty of exercise, but why waste my time walking around my neighborhood when I could be doing something interesting or productive? I work hard so I can afford to get places quickly, not so I could act like a poor person or a car-less hippie dependent on public transportation. Do you people collect dung for your cooking fires on your treks to the grocery store, too?
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@boomzilla said:
Do you people collect dung for your cooking fires on your treks to the grocery store, too?
Yes. What of it?
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@dhromed said:
@boomzilla said:
Do you people collect dung for your cooking fires on your treks to the grocery store, too?
Yes. What of it?Dang. I never thought I could be considered a Euro-optimist, but I didn't think things were that bad...
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@boomzilla said:
Dang. I never thought I could be considered a Euro-optimist, but I didn't think things were that bad...
You have no idea how much the scent seasons roadkill over an open fire.
And keeps the flies away.
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I don't even have a goddamn smartphone.
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@dhromed said:
I don't even have a goddamn smartphone.
My phone plan charges $0.20 for each incoming text. Also, my phone plays a 10 second AT&T commercial whenever I turn it on or off.
