Sydney Declutters Parking Signs with E-Ink
citylab.com
citylab.com
I once parked my car on a street with no parking restriction signs anywhere. I went back to the car to get something a few hours later and they were placing signs down the street. As soon as a sign was placed, they would ticket the cars nearby. I moved my car just in time.
With this tech, they could do this at will. Probably correlated with whenever the people running the city want more money.
Give it 6 months and someone will have modified these signs. Probably in a crude, old Nokia phone cabled to the back of the sign, method.
Hopefully it will be seen as a useful signpost (no pun intended) for the ongoing challenge of distributing digital info to an, on average, trusting public.
Don't be surprised if you see some unlimited parking in Sydney next April 1st.
Rule of thumb: If there is no Hollywood film where a terrorist attacks your target, probably neither will a real terrorist.
Also obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/538/
http://jalopnik.com/5516635/the-secret-of-las-10-year-old-fa...
This is a bit more complex than a regular micro-controlled LCD. There are a number of ways you can drive an e-ink display. Then there are a number of ways you can choose to control such a display remotely. Last but not least, a sizeable chunk of the stack powering these displays is proprietary technology, and has been in development for more than 3 years.
Almost everything is hackable when you have physical access to the system. That's why such systems should detect and report tampering. Something regular traffic signs never did in the first place.
And "more than three years". Oooh. OpenSSL was in development for what, 16 years, and heartbleed happened anyways.
I have no doubt it's a little bit harder than a few weeks with a USB cable and a traffic sign, but assuming they will not be tampered with at some point is not born out by any facts we know about software.
The big downside is when you park you don't just need to know the conditions when you park, you need to know the conditions for the entire length of your intended stay. You also need confidence that the signs will remain unchanging throughout your stay because if the signs update and you get a ticket the burden of proof is going to fall on you to prove your innocence.
In any case, analog signs are changes from time to time anyway, so the objection is not new in principle. The simplest solution is then use whatever method was used previously to resolve this.
https://www.visionect.com/blog/worlds-first-epaper-traffic-s...
Edits - hmm, not even that link when clicked from here renders anything. I have to manually refresh or copy and paste it to get things to show.
Don't the people buying and operating the signs have a substantial financial incentive to create confusion? I'm just saying, don't expect people to sabotage their own paychecks.
Park car, read sign: cool to park here.
Return to car with ticket, read sign: no parking, huge fine.
It's like those quick change speed limit signs the evil sheriff from the dukes of hazard would put up to generate speeding tickets.
Talking about bad signs I once got a fine for parking on a road near the Randwick Racecourse (this is next to UNSW). It was fine to park there expect on race days. You would think this would be pretty easy to work this out as the race course was visible from the road and when they were running races there were horses and people everywhere. If only it was so simple - apparently race days could be race days at other race tracks meaning a race happening somewhere else meant you got a fine. How a normal person was supposed to know this is beyond me.
There are streets around here that vary between pedestrian only, limited traffic (i.e. deliveries to serve local shops), and open access but one way, depending on the time of day. They are gated by signs with three faces, the right one is rotated into view at the appropriate times.
This is just an e-ink version of such signs, which achieves the same aim and will be more flexible as they are presumably easier to update if/when the rules change and aren't limited in the number of display options as a mechanical display is.
My concern would be that these new displays might be harder to read depending on lighting conditions.
They address that in the last sentence:
> And for folks who have trouble reading dull, iron-colored screens, they also feature little lights that illuminate the text at night.
It's also redundant in that photo - a Clearway sign next to a No Stopping sign?
You haven't spent much time in San Francisco, have you? The parking violation system is corrupt, mobbed up, malicious, and I'm amazed that there hasn't been an axe-handles and pitchforks style fix to it.
e.g., the sign could advertise its own URL of sydneyparking.com/DF7S9 and show any extra detail there.
Disclosure: I worked with Visionect a few years ago to develop an e-ink restaurant menu.
The latest 6" Kindle with WiFi is ~$80 (on Prime Day it was going for ~$50). Given that it has WiFi and there are some Jailbreaks for Kindle you could get a Kindle to do this same thing. If you want better contrast you could upgrade to the Kindle Paperwhite for $120. That's anywhere from 8% to 20% of the cost of the Visionect system.
EDIT: Turns out the Kindle can do quite a bit including running a web server, web browser, SSH and much more so this should be easily doable.
[1]: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=128704
The Visionect kit is cheaper, more capable and better supported than comparable dev kits.
[0] https://www.mainstreet.com/article/exclusive-amazon-s-79-kin...
How long do you think a kindle would last out in the elements? What is the battery like? What is the I/O like? Security (physical and software)? Is the screen contrast similar? SDK support? Customizability? 60601 ? All of these things are potentially expensive to provide.
Anyway, it may not be the right dev kit for your applications, but the fact that they share a display technology is a tiny piece of the puzzle. As you note, for you, the kindle might do a lot more for less cost (in which case, why not just use one?)
In my experience, looking at mass produced consumer electronics is a pretty terrible way to spitball the cost of anything that isn't mass produced consumer electronics.
It's very common for these companies to sell dev kits at high cost because the volume is tiny and the overhead of filling the order for them is large. This is nothing new.
I feel that a lot restaurants that change menus frequently pride themselves on printing new menus every day. When you get the menu, it seems to reinforce the idea that everything - the menu, the ingredients, etc. - is fresh. Not sure that holding an e-ink reader that's been handled thousands of times by others would give the same feeling, but maybe I'm wrong?
The company seems to have pivoted to a more lucrative business model though (Slovenian population is 2MM, with GDP per capita somewhere around 17000 EUR).
Pipe dream 2: The populace rises up and refuses to pay any fine unless the data is available via an API and legally binding.
http://www.digitalsignageconnection.com/australian-road-and-...
From what I can see, nothing specifically states that the signs are intended to be changed extremely frequently, nor that the information displayed is strictly for right now.
With good design and usage, issues like not knowing if you will be able to park in the signposted area in two hours time become less likely. The ability to change the signs frequently doesn't mean that they will. The examples shown tended to be things like
* No parking during Sunday markets
* No parking from 3pm - 11pm on a special event day
Obviously these could be abused, or used poorly, but I wouldn't say that they are bad because of that fact.
http://priceonomics.com/a-designers-war-on-misleading-parkin...
The reality is, I want to know one thing: How long can I park here.
Maybe the length of time is 0 (No parking). You show: No Parking.
Maybe it's for the next 4 hours: Parking 4 Hours Remaining. Or maybe you put the time when it ends: Parking until 6 AM.
Maybe it's only for people with tag 13-A: Parking 13-A Only.
Either you can park someplace, or you can't. You can have the complete rules if people want to plan ahead, but they shouldn't be what people need to read while driving around trying to find a parking spot.
One set of signs I pass rather often in Seattle looks (and probably is) complicated, but the reasoning behind it makes some sense. It is against a yellow-painted curb and says:
- No parking 6a-9a / 3p-7p except Sat/Sun/Hol
- 30-minute loading only 9a-3p / 7p-10p except Sat/Sun/Hol
- 3-minute loading only 9a-11a Sun
- <----- No parking
Why? The adjoining property is a large church that sits on what is now a major arterial route near businesses. In order, the restrictions allow for commute hours traffic in that lane, reserve a zone for deliveries during the rest of the hours in a weekday, reserve a zone for parishioners to get out at the door of the church, and foreclose parking that is too close to the corner and a fire hydrant. Parking is, implicitly, allowed all day on Saturday when commute hours aren't in effect, some of the businesses are closed and the remainder are receiving fewer/no deliveries, and the church isn't in session.
Those are only used for special events and don't change very often. This is a good example for their use. I agree with what others have said about the risks and concerns if this were to be used for ALL parking signs.
I've often thought that printing the signs using liquid crystal technology would be useful, so ice warnings would only be visible when the temperature was at least close to 0C
Public signage typically has high visual contrast, doesn't it? The dynamic, somewhat critical information these are displaying is tragically muddy and hard to resolve, even from some of these photos here.
A shame. Before seeing the end-result, I thought it was a cracking-good idea.
http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
Or easier: compare to the signs around it. It's much less readable. Traffic signs aren't like Funky Website Of The Month. It's not okay for traffic signs to just ignore inconvenient users - so even if they were skirting some visibility standards, it wouldn't be good enough. They need to be really clear, not barely passable (and this sign isn't even that).
And this photo is reasonably lit, without overcast conditions, mist, or rain. People often forget to include those when discussing road-related things like speed limits or signage.
I really think that regardless of how much you need to squint to make out a parking sign it would still be better than some of those monstrosities that have about 20 exceptions depending on the time of day.
Have a look at their sample photos. Two of the photos have the sign by themselves. This clears up what kind of confusion? How are they better then a normal sign in this location? The remaining photo has two other signs, which work together fine with a non-e-ink version of the e-ink sign. Hardly a monstrosity.
The only advantage the photographed sign really has is that the council can easily change the details on it between different roadwork events, without having to glue a new set of numbers on it.
I was expecting something like changing marks on the street, maybe even auto-rearranging parking lot marks. That's what I imagined "E-Ink" / "electronic ink" to be. However, it's just a display within a sign.
Not sure about other cities, but at Berlin's highways, we have this for years. It is used to adjust speed limits to traffic, avoiding or dewarping traffic jams. It is also used to block lanes as needed, e.g. during the time tunnels are cleaned, without having to put up signs and moving them with the workers while cleaning.
What is so spectacular about using same old idea for parking signs?
Am I missing something?