Cycling Thoughts
I always like this time of year because the Tour de France is on. I'm a reasonably good recreational cyclist, I ride a road bike as transport, and also as my main form of exercise. Right now, in the university break, I'm mostly riding from Belair in the Adelaide hills, up to Mount Lofty, the highest hill in the range. It's only about 14 kilometers (maybe 9 miles) but it goes from 350 meters (1000 feet) up to 800 meters (2400 feet) so that's a nice way to stay in shape (55 minutes up, 25 minutes back, great view at the top).
I've always cycled, but I'm probably fitter now than I've ever been, largely thanks to a ride I went on in France last year, when I rode from Avignon in Provence to Cannes on the coast, a zig-zag 500 kilometers or so (300 miles) in seven days, with LOTS of hills. Best of all, I ate like a horse, three huge meals a day plus constant snacks, and still lost weight. That ride made me realise I was capable of far more than I'd thought, and I stopped being a pussy who was scared of hills and distances. In fact, I'd particularly recommend cycling to a) anyone female, because it's the best thigh/hip/backside exercise ever invented, and those are the regions women are always complaining about (I'm still astonished more women don't cycle given this fact) and b) anyone struggling to find enough time for exercise in a day, who doesn't live too far from work. Cycling to work may take longer, but if it's feasible (and it's usually more feasible than people think, given that I don't go too much slower than the cars in heavy traffic -- those traffic lights really even things up) then you won't have to worry about gym membership or whatever other exercise you need to stay in shape, so you save time and money overall... especially with fuel costs as they are now.
A few non-cyclists have asked me about safety. I'm pretty careful, and Australian drivers are improving, thanks in part to recent publicity from the death of Amy Gillet in Germany (check out the Amy Gillet Foundation) and though every cyclist has some incidents that make him wince, I haven't had an actual crash since high school. That crash was on a cyclepath with a pedestrian, who walked straight out from behind a parked car without looking. This is the first lesson that surprises non-cyclists -- cyclepaths are lethal, you're safer on the road. Pedestrians should be treated by cyclists like ordinance-disposal experts treat landmines -- without exception, pedestrians are blind, deaf, stupid and dangerous. They obey no rules, and change their minds, direction and velocity at the blink of an eye. Cars are at least predictable, most of the time, and don't weave erratically from side to side for no apparent reason.
The second lesson is that the two worst kinds of drivers are the young, and the old. Of these two, I feel safer with the young... which is surprising, considering how many V8-driving meatheads around Adelaide seem determined to get themselves killed while still on their P-Plates. Yeah yeah, I know the insurance companies say young drivers cause far more accidents than old drivers -- that might be true for car drivers, but I'll bet anything (without knowing the actual stats) that it doesn't apply to pedestrians or cyclists. Just yesterday I nearly got clipped climbing Mount Lofty by an old guy too busy using his windshield-squirters to see me... he missed my handlebars by a foot on an open stretch of road, I know it gave him a shock too because he lifted abruptly from the accelerator just as he passed me... no help there, mate. At the bottom of Mount Lofty, there's a roundabout, and another old guy there simply drove out in front of me when I had right of way. And appologised later -- again, no help there, mate. And just down in Blackwood, another old guy pulled into a carpark just as I happened to be riding past the entrance... at 20kph it wasn't dangerous, I just braked and yelled at him. But there's a trend here -- old people don't see very well. Well enough to see other cars, maybe. But not cyclists, and not pedestrians. There's a brave little kid in Sydney who could tell you that -- Sofy Delezio, a minor celebrity in Australia after being hit twice in the space of a few years by cars driven (badly) by older drivers. If you're an older person, and offended by this, then I appologise... but that won't stop me from gripping my brakes extra tight if I see you driving past. I'm not PC with my safety.
All of this has got me thinking about solutions in Science Fiction terms. And it strikes me that technologies like this could turn out to have duel purposes. You start with a more sophisticated GPS system that can measure the location of every vehicle down to a couple of meters. Then you visually-scan every street in a city into a 3-D map (mount cameras or radar scanners on vehicles and drive until you've mapped each streetscape with recognisable lightpoles, trafficlights, trees, roadsigns, etc). Then, you mandate every car has a little package attached -- first, it has multiple small cameras forward and back, watching the streetscape. It transmits its view back to a central traffic control computer, which recognises the streetscape, and calculates those angles together with the GPS to measure the car's position down to the centimeter. All this takes place in realtime, with every vehicle on the road, so the computer knows exactly where every vehicle is.
That means it can calculate impending collisions in advance, if the driver hasn't seen it. You could even mount a little package on a bicycle if they made it small enough, which would mean that that guy at the roundabout who didn't see me, as soon as he touches his accelerator, the central traffic control knows he's about to hit me. The simplest thing would be to give it an override, so it slams on his brakes. A system like that would pretty much eliminate accidents caused by driver error in those situations... it would also make speeding completely illegal and %100 enforceable, by simply cutting off the accelerator when you break the speed limit. Steering-related accidents would be harder to stop, because it's dangerous to have some central AI overriding the driver's steering wheel... but if you had Head Up Displays in future cars, the traffic net could highlight cyclists in colour on the windshield itself. And maybe give the steering a little nudge toward the middle of the road if the driver isn't giving enough space, and if there's no obstacles in the middle of the road.
All this would be a precursor to the days of true AI, when cars drive themselves without driver input... but it would be a good intermediary stage, allowing the technology to develop more gradually. And could save, I think, a hell of a lot of lives.
I've always cycled, but I'm probably fitter now than I've ever been, largely thanks to a ride I went on in France last year, when I rode from Avignon in Provence to Cannes on the coast, a zig-zag 500 kilometers or so (300 miles) in seven days, with LOTS of hills. Best of all, I ate like a horse, three huge meals a day plus constant snacks, and still lost weight. That ride made me realise I was capable of far more than I'd thought, and I stopped being a pussy who was scared of hills and distances. In fact, I'd particularly recommend cycling to a) anyone female, because it's the best thigh/hip/backside exercise ever invented, and those are the regions women are always complaining about (I'm still astonished more women don't cycle given this fact) and b) anyone struggling to find enough time for exercise in a day, who doesn't live too far from work. Cycling to work may take longer, but if it's feasible (and it's usually more feasible than people think, given that I don't go too much slower than the cars in heavy traffic -- those traffic lights really even things up) then you won't have to worry about gym membership or whatever other exercise you need to stay in shape, so you save time and money overall... especially with fuel costs as they are now.
A few non-cyclists have asked me about safety. I'm pretty careful, and Australian drivers are improving, thanks in part to recent publicity from the death of Amy Gillet in Germany (check out the Amy Gillet Foundation) and though every cyclist has some incidents that make him wince, I haven't had an actual crash since high school. That crash was on a cyclepath with a pedestrian, who walked straight out from behind a parked car without looking. This is the first lesson that surprises non-cyclists -- cyclepaths are lethal, you're safer on the road. Pedestrians should be treated by cyclists like ordinance-disposal experts treat landmines -- without exception, pedestrians are blind, deaf, stupid and dangerous. They obey no rules, and change their minds, direction and velocity at the blink of an eye. Cars are at least predictable, most of the time, and don't weave erratically from side to side for no apparent reason.
The second lesson is that the two worst kinds of drivers are the young, and the old. Of these two, I feel safer with the young... which is surprising, considering how many V8-driving meatheads around Adelaide seem determined to get themselves killed while still on their P-Plates. Yeah yeah, I know the insurance companies say young drivers cause far more accidents than old drivers -- that might be true for car drivers, but I'll bet anything (without knowing the actual stats) that it doesn't apply to pedestrians or cyclists. Just yesterday I nearly got clipped climbing Mount Lofty by an old guy too busy using his windshield-squirters to see me... he missed my handlebars by a foot on an open stretch of road, I know it gave him a shock too because he lifted abruptly from the accelerator just as he passed me... no help there, mate. At the bottom of Mount Lofty, there's a roundabout, and another old guy there simply drove out in front of me when I had right of way. And appologised later -- again, no help there, mate. And just down in Blackwood, another old guy pulled into a carpark just as I happened to be riding past the entrance... at 20kph it wasn't dangerous, I just braked and yelled at him. But there's a trend here -- old people don't see very well. Well enough to see other cars, maybe. But not cyclists, and not pedestrians. There's a brave little kid in Sydney who could tell you that -- Sofy Delezio, a minor celebrity in Australia after being hit twice in the space of a few years by cars driven (badly) by older drivers. If you're an older person, and offended by this, then I appologise... but that won't stop me from gripping my brakes extra tight if I see you driving past. I'm not PC with my safety.
All of this has got me thinking about solutions in Science Fiction terms. And it strikes me that technologies like this could turn out to have duel purposes. You start with a more sophisticated GPS system that can measure the location of every vehicle down to a couple of meters. Then you visually-scan every street in a city into a 3-D map (mount cameras or radar scanners on vehicles and drive until you've mapped each streetscape with recognisable lightpoles, trafficlights, trees, roadsigns, etc). Then, you mandate every car has a little package attached -- first, it has multiple small cameras forward and back, watching the streetscape. It transmits its view back to a central traffic control computer, which recognises the streetscape, and calculates those angles together with the GPS to measure the car's position down to the centimeter. All this takes place in realtime, with every vehicle on the road, so the computer knows exactly where every vehicle is.
That means it can calculate impending collisions in advance, if the driver hasn't seen it. You could even mount a little package on a bicycle if they made it small enough, which would mean that that guy at the roundabout who didn't see me, as soon as he touches his accelerator, the central traffic control knows he's about to hit me. The simplest thing would be to give it an override, so it slams on his brakes. A system like that would pretty much eliminate accidents caused by driver error in those situations... it would also make speeding completely illegal and %100 enforceable, by simply cutting off the accelerator when you break the speed limit. Steering-related accidents would be harder to stop, because it's dangerous to have some central AI overriding the driver's steering wheel... but if you had Head Up Displays in future cars, the traffic net could highlight cyclists in colour on the windshield itself. And maybe give the steering a little nudge toward the middle of the road if the driver isn't giving enough space, and if there's no obstacles in the middle of the road.
All this would be a precursor to the days of true AI, when cars drive themselves without driver input... but it would be a good intermediary stage, allowing the technology to develop more gradually. And could save, I think, a hell of a lot of lives.
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