How to Paint 50k Miles of Lines
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
edit: For what it's worth, my impression at the time is that this is an industry ripe for disruption. Every city / state / county has to deal with road striping. They do it through a combination of their own rigging and/or various firms who specialize in this stuff - both hardware and software - but where there isn't a dominate provider. It's classic B-school stuff: take a cottage industry and standardize the process, outperform your competitors because of your standardization, and become the monopoly.
I ran into this myself being involved in a highway project along the Oregon coast. There was a very fine balance of paint reflectivity, traction, and wear resilience that had to be met and it turned out it was very, very trick to hit the right spot.
E.G., the paint itself has very poor traction characteristics when wet, which it often is on the pacific coast. Adding texture coatings to it then impacts the reflectivity, but reflective additives within the texturizer cause it to wear faster..
We were only paving 4 miles, but I saw several inspectors grow a lot of gray hair over the course of a few months.
As to why the hybrid idea never made it to the USA is the USA did not suffer continuous allied bombings and therefor had no need to develop a multipurpose vehicle. The Unimog replaced two vehicles thus being very convenient and cost effective in post war Germany. A single vehicle could till fields, haul crops, haul building materials, and plow snow. USA had all of those things already. Why reinvent the wheel?
He is long gone, so I can tell this story.
He stole a bunch of paint they used for street markings, and painted his house. Supposedly it would light up at night when cars went by.
I never saw the house at night though myself.
> outperform your competitors because of your standardization, and become the monopoly
I'm not sure what your goal is here, either it's innovation or creating a monopoly, but you can't really argue for both at the same time.
There are certainly other ways to create a monopoly, such as regulatory capture, illegal activities, and price dumping, but natural monopolies due to superior levels of innovation do exist. The reason we generally want to avoid monopolies isn't because of the way they are created, it's because of the damage they can cause after they are firmly established.
Most commercial LiDAR trucks are accurate down to millimeters in relative terms and centimeters in absolute position terms. The equipment has been certified by approved surveying bodies, and there are official records as to that specific piece of collection equipment’s accuracy and precision.
If any autonomous car company could deliver data to that standard then it would be valuable. But to my knowledge none of them can, because the accuracy of measurement systems for surveying roads at motion are so specialized and expensive.
When I was there, it was a combination of (1) downwards facing line lasers measuring distance + reflectivity, (which was viewed as a greyscale image, around 4k pixels == width of a lane iirc) and (2) forward facing cameras for tagging assets like signs, plus (3) velodyne lidars for much coarser 3D point cloud (including measuring bridge heights). The scanning worked up to a bit under 70 mph, which was impressive to me, particularly that first part of the sensor package.
Apparently here in the US they use beads of glass sprayed onto the wet paint for reflection. It kinda works; but for the longest time I wondered why the paint here is nowhere near as reflective as the kind used in Europe which has little bumps for sound but also better visibility with rain.
https://www.morenoconseil.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/SER...
The profiled crew was in Michigan I think(?) where you get snow and drastic changes in weather.
That affects the available materials. Can they survive salt and freezing, and being scraped by snow plows etc...
What is it about driving a car that turns people who are probably otherwise normal adults into literal babies. Who screams (honks) as loud as they can, without a care for who it might bother? Babies. Who throws things at people when they are upset? Babies.
I think the requirements to be licenced to drive should include a basic understanding of traffic dynamics. When a person gets in your way so you can't speed through the lights and you end up waiting at a red, they didn't lengthen your trip at all and are not worthy of any directed rage. You were just going to be stopped by the next light and get to your destination at around the same time. If there is roadwork or an accident, everyone is in the same boat and no single person can speed you up or slow you down.
We've all collectively just accepted to be subjected to an enormous amount of noise pollution and sometimes deadly violence on the road simply because people can't understand and/or accept the realities of how driving infrastructure works. It's kind of mind-blowing if you consider it.
It's like Usenet, or FaceBook. Two layers of glass (driver+worker) give people some anonymity and they stop treating others with some respect.
I used to car commute & now use bike/transit exclusively. I see more people being considerate, apologizing for confusion, etc. in a given day than I used to see in a year of driving in California. The reduced safety & quality of life isn’t just because cars are faster - a lot of people just seem to do the same thing internet commenters do and let distance bring out their worst sides, only they’re doing it with several tons of metal which can reach killing speed in less time than it takes to think.
They're not angry at the road crew. They're angry at the state police, DOT bureaucrat or whoever that decided to block off way more road than was strictly necessary and they're taking it out on the road crew. They're angry at the state for making their lives harder than strictly necessary and they're taking it out on the messenger.
>When a person gets in your way so you can't speed through the lights and you end up waiting at a red, they didn't lengthen your trip at all and are not worthy of any directed rage
If it never has positive ROI people wouldn't do it. Just because people don't share the same reading of the situation as you doesn't make them stupid. During peak hours where I live missing a light adds more than just that light to the time because you now are behind more traffic that just got onto the road. So instead of waiting two cycles to get through the next light you might wait three, and so on and so on.
>We've all collectively just accepted to be subjected to an enormous amount of noise pollution and sometimes deadly violence on the road simply because people can't understand and/or accept the realities of how driving infrastructure works.
One man's "accept the inevitable" is another man's "needlessly bend over and take the unnecessary". If people went when the light turn green, didn't stop at cloverleafs(!!), etc there's be a lot less honking.
I don't see why this is so baffling. Humans gonna human.
The car didn't handle any of those situations well. I had a hard enough time with the first two that I'm not surprised.
Ah, I know that feeling...
(And what the hell is wrong with someone that gets angry at a road crew?)
> When Garza presses a black button spraying white paint on the road, it also triggers a second gun behind the paint gun to sprinkle tiny salt-size glass beads. If the paint is too thin, beads won’t stick to it. That means the lines won’t reflect light.
I don't think they use these beads in the road paint universally. The lines here in the piedmont region of NC are virtually impossible to see at night, especially when they are wet.
Seems a lot of people feel this way. Haven’t you seen those “end construction” protest signs? People seem to post them almost anywhere crews are working!
Come to the UK then. A crew were actually caught working once. It made national headlines.
They're not angry at the road crew. They're angry at the state police, DOT bureaucrat or whoever that decided to block off way more road than they see being strictly necessary, inconveniencing them, and they're taking it out on the road crew.
I have this longing thirst to become as independent as possible but it just seems pointless considering how far we've advanced as a society.
Also keyboard arrows worked, which was a nice touch.
Sure, but what about content that is always visible that you scroll manually to signal your intent to read something, and then read where you stop yourself? You know, like a classic web page.
Thats a lot of paint.
And the video content was great.
Even in most slideshows, much less most articles, the text is all I really am interested in anyway.
They really wouldn't need to spend so much on hosting fees if they were willing to do a text-only version - the main website is heavy as hell. I'm sure many people would be willing to pay for it.
Also these days I don't consume regular content from sources that do not provide an RSS feed.
I still think you're right though, human labor is likely more costly.