Can cameras curb close calls?

Quiz time: exactly where and when was the UK’s initial speed camera installed?

Answer: on the westbound A316 at Twickenham, west London, in 1992.

They had been initially introduced to encourage drivers to slow down in accident hot spots, but they’re now being utilised to catch out all kinds of errant motorists, from red lights-runners to bus lane bandits.

And it appears like the speed camera could be about to add an additional string to its bow. The Highways Agency has just awarded a £79,000 contract to test a system that can detect drivers who travel as well close to the vehicle in front, much more generally recognized as ‘tailgaters’.

Don’t drive so close to me

Tailgating is a critical problem on UK roads, highlighted by a 2010 report from the Transport Investigation Laboratory which estimated that tailgating was the cause of nearly a third (29%) of motorway crashes.

And motorway crashes are of developing concern following a Division of Transport report which revealed the quantity of folks killed on motorways rose from 88 to 25 last year, this in spite of an all round fall in the quantity of deaths across the complete road ne2rk.

To attempt and curb the difficulty, police have been provided the powers to concern penalty points and on-the-spot fines of £100 to any drivers caught tailgating, hogging the middle or outer lane of a motorway, mounting the pavement or accelerating by way of a puddle.

More than 5,000 drivers had been caught out inside the first 6 months of the new ‘careless driving’ legislation coming into force, and this quantity could develop even further as soon as the new technologies is brought in.

Preliminary trials are scheduled to end in May possibly 2015 and, if productive, the method will be given further motorway trials.

How close is also close?

For the trial to be a accomplishment, the Highways Agency and police will have to establish how close a driver can get to the vehicle in front prior to they’re deemed to be committing an offence.

The Highway Code indicates that when driving on quicker roads, motorists need to leave a gap of at least 2 seconds amongst themselves and the car in front. Although some roads have chevrons to delineate this gap, motorists could uncover this difficult to judge on roads that do not.

And although the system could undoubtedly boost road safety and decrease accidents, if employed indiscriminately there is a danger it could make drivers too cautious, top to huge gaps among cars and causing greater congestion.

There will also have to be a safeguard in place to safeguard innocent drivers who leave a secure distance amongst themselves and the car in front, only to have yet another driver cut in front of them, which itself opens up a entire other can of worms.

But if these difficulties can be ironed out with no fixed-penalty notices being dished out indiscriminately, then the scheme should get the backing of motorists – a Populus survey of 16,600 drivers carried out on behalf of the AA identified 76% would support the technologies.

More than to you – would you support far more cameras lining the roads to catch errant motorists?

Can cameras curb close calls?

LeMons Sebring Day 1: Porsche 944 Leads, Duff Beer Civic Close Behind

After inspecting the machines of a small but devoted band of racers on Friday, the initial race session of the initial-ever Humidi TT 24 Hours of LeMons took place on Saturday at Sebring International Raceway. Even even though a wild afternoon lightning storm blasted many pieces of track infrastructure and forced the evacuation of the flag stations, we had many hours of good racing. When the checkered flag flew, German and Japanese marques owned the upper element of the standings, with the leading 5 going Porsche, Honda, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Honda. Meanwhile, the Class C battle gave us intense drama throughout the day. Here’s what occurred.

Even though Porsche 944s have been really frustrating LeMons automobiles in the previous, the first-ever Porsche all round LeMons win final year might have changed the rules a bit. At the end of Saturday’s race session at Sebring, the Floridiot Motorsports 1986 Porsche 944 owned the P1 spot. This team had to rebuild their engine’s cylinder head on the night before the race and went via a last-feasible-second tech inspection on Saturday morning. The crew spent the day chewing their fingernails to the swift with be concerned more than their questionable engine, but the red Porsche refrained from dumping its connecting rods onto the tarmac.

On the quite identical lap as the Floridiots, however, was a team that has spent a lot of years mired in the lower portion of the standings in a variety of southern LeMons races: the Duff Beer Honda Civic. We’d grow to be so accustomed to seeing the Duff Beer crew up to their armpits in broken Honda engine parts more than the years that we believed there must be some mistake when we saw the familiar ’94 Civic sweating the overall leader for the race lead. Positive, the Duff guys are excellent drivers, but all the racing ability in the planet will not assist you when your 19th D16 of the year just spun another main bearing. Since the LeMons Supreme Court placed the tough-luck Duff Beer auto in Class B, the group is leading their class by an intimidating 8 laps.

Major Class C is the slow-but-trus2rthy 1964 Dart of Escape Velocity Racing. With 225 cubic inches of Slant-6 energy and a pushbutton-controlled automatic transmission, the Escape Velocity Dart holds a 9-lap lead more than its 1964 Ford rival.

The Group Fairlylame 1964 Ford Fairlane isn’t a lot quicker than the Dart about the Sebring course, in spite of its 64-cubic-inch engine-displacement edge, so the Ford racers will require to be prepared to take benefit of a driver mistake or mechanical difficulty on the portion of the Escape Velocity group.

The larger worry for the Dart team, however, have to be the Group Idle Clatter 1979 Mercedes-Benz 300SD. Though the huge oil-burning Benz is a great 10-15 seconds slower per lap than the Dodge, the team’s black-flag-cost-free driving and the car’s impressive fuel economy have them locked just a single lap behind Escape Velocity Racing. Neither group has ever earned a Class C win, so expect no quarter asked nor given between these 2 on Sunday.

Meanwhile, the considerably-anticipated race-within-a-race between the Chrysler Sebring of Speedycop & the Gang of Outlaws and the Chrysler Sebring of NSF Racing sorted out about as absolutely everyone anticipated: both vehicles suffered a number of mechanical ailments in among bouts of creaking around the course in the fashion we have come to count on from unloved 1990s Chrysler front-drivers. When the checkered flag came out, the Speedycop 2000 Sebring was in P18, with 64 laps, great for a 6-lap edge more than the 1999 NSF Sebring.

Each Sebrings are depressingly stock, neither team even bothering to modify the oil or install decent tires. Nevertheless, the Sebring-versus-Sebring-at-Sebring race has diehard LeMons fans worked into a competitive frenzy. Which of the 2 legendary teams will see their Sebring via to victory in the 12 Hours (in fact 14-1/2 hours) of Sebrings? Verify in later to find out!

Photographs by Nick Pon and Murilee “Judge Phil” Martin

LeMons Sebring Day 1: Porsche 944 Leads, Duff Beer Civic Close Behind

The Google driverless car in close to future

Although Google has enough funds to invest in producing cars, that likelihood is remote. Much more probably alternatives consist of collaborating with major carmakers or giving away the computer software, as Google did with its Android operating method.

The Google driverless car is a project by Google that entails creating technologies for autonomous automobiles. The computer software powering Google’s automobiles is referred to as Google Chauffeur. The project is at present becoming led by Google engineer Sebastian Thrun, former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-inventor of Google Street View. Thrun’s team at Stanford produced the robotic automobile Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and its US$ 2 million prize from the United States Department of Defense.

The group developing the method consisted of 15 engineers working for Google, such as Chris Urmson, Mike Montemerlo, and Anthony Levandowski who had worked on the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges.

Meanwhile, standard automakers are developing driverless automobiles of their personal. Renault-Nissan strategy to deliver their 1st model to the public by 2020.

Google’s robotic automobiles have about $ 150,000 in equipment such as a $ 70,000 LIDAR (laser radar) system. The variety finder mounted on the prime is a Velodyne 64-beam laser. This laser makes it possible for the car to create a detailed 3D map of its environment. The automobile then requires these generated maps and combines them with high-resolution maps of the world, generating different sorts of data models that let it to drive itself.

Google says its cars have now driven about 700,000 accident-cost-free miles on freeways in “autonomous mode” — with the automobile in control, even though a security driver sits behind the wheel. That’s the equivalent of about 120 San Francisco-to-Manhattan-to-San Francisco road trips.

In August 2011, a human-controlled Google driverless vehicle was involved in a crash close to Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA. Google has stated that the vehicle was getting driven manually at the time of the accident.A prior incident involved a Google driverless auto becoming rear-ended even though stopped at a visitors light.Google says that neither of these incidents had been the fault of Google’s auto but the fault of other humans operating the auto.

With that accomplishment, Google has been focusing on city driving for about the past year. Freeways are reasonably straightforward for the automobiles — no blind corners, no cyclists and no pedestrians. City streets have all that and a lot more, including intersections and complex interactions with other drivers, such as who goes very first at a 4-way quit sign.

About the Author: Igor Sekuloski, CPIA is a CEO & Founder of Insurox, a national on the internet insurance agency.

The Google driverless car in close to future