Same here
In many states you can treat a “malfunctioning” signal as a stop sign after waiting for a reasonable amount of time (usually at least two minutes.) Obviously this doesn’t work at a busy intersection but when a light refuses to change in the middle of the night it can be a real savior.
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Problem is proving it, particularly if it was just the high ground clearance of your vehicle causing the problem. The traffic signal system I worked on generated detector alarms for failed detectors, and that was based entirely on an absence of messages from the device in a period of time. In many cases this would cause the system to fall back to running the associated movement from time to time, based on historical data.
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Ummm…yes. I tip my virtual hat to ya.
This reminds me of something I heard from Greenpeace Canada in the 1990s, I can’t reference further than that, or show how this was calculated, but apparently, when you calculate the average time spent working towards car ownership (including time spent earning money for purchase/lease costs, gas, repairs etc, and the time spent car washing, driving to the car wash/gas station etc.) and the average time spent driving, for every 5 minutes spent driving, we spend 1 hour working towards driving, on average. GET OUT AND WALK!
I paid my dues walking my ass off for years and i’m happy with my car once i was able to afford one
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Though the real argument is about urban planning in The US, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. Because you really do need a car to live in those places. I cycle to work in Australia but I am one of the few who can afford an inner city house.
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Of course, i hate driving and if i could live somewhere that had awesome public transportation and infrastructure i would much prefer not having to deal with a vehicle. But i live in the US and not having a car significantly affected my independence and options.
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You win the Internets tonight. That was brilliant.
That’s good design. Even better if there’s also an LED that’s ON when the button press is accepted by the controller.
'Course, still doesn’t mean the button press will do anything. Some obviously do affect the light pattern, but as with elevator CLOSE/OPEN DOOR buttons, some (many?) don’t anything other than giving the user a sense of control.
Certainly at some short time interval the processor is only able to “look” at one thing (“input”) at a time. But even with 30-year old PLCs or microcontrollers, input polling can easily happen 20 or more times a second.
So a very quick press of the button might be missed. But pretty unlikely. And there are likely programming technique to reduce the problem to “almost impossible”.
I think the multi-press thing is either an attempt to show the device “I’m in charge, pay attention to me!” or an OCD-like tic, such as “The Big Bang Theory”'s Sheldon needing to knock & say the person’s name three times at the door.
You could weld a couple hundred pounds of steel below the frame.
If this moves the center of gravity down, would the bike handle better? I’m guessing not, since no bike has such a ballast…
ETA: added replies to enkidoodler and Jorpho’s posts to make the mutli-reply bot happy.
Around here they have little bicycle markers on the edges of the detection loops. Put your tire on that and almost all of them seem to trigger as expected.
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Thats more likely to be a debounce feature, and is probably in the detector hardware rather than the controller CPU. Its fairly trivial to turn a brief click into a longer pulse downstream, but the system will be focused on rejecting pulses which are just dodgy contacts inside a switch.
To give you an example I have a microswitch on my garage door wired to a microcontroller and a raspberry pi. It sends me a slack message when the door opens and closes. About one third of the time I get stray messages when the switch contacts bounce.
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I think a lot of the confusing about pedestrian crossings is that sometimes pressing the button will trigger a red light and sometimes the traffic lights are on a timer, so you get to cross when it rolls around to your junction. I know some of the junctions near where I live are on timers during the day (ie around rush hours), and will go back to vehicle sensing during the night.
On the timed junctions, pressing the pedestrian crossing button will activate the little red/green men lights, but won’t actually affect the timing of the car lights. If you don’t press the button the cars will still stop, but you just won’t see the green man telling you to walk.
Of course, we don’t have jaywalking laws over here so it’s often easier just to cross during a break in traffic.
Get yourself a nice big magnet and put it on your oil pan. Not only will it trap loose iron/steel particles it’ll create a field big enough to trip those sensors for you.
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