$18 for a beer at the 2022 PGA Championship (Tulsa Oklahoma)

[Leo Enticknap]

In relation to Harold's remarks about rooftop solar, we went in a similar direction, except that we had it installed when we bought the house in 2015, and specified a system that should cover all our routine consumption (an 8kW peak system). I did the math at the time, and concluded that given our likely power consumption and SoCal Edison's price for a kWH, the system would likely take 6-7 years to pay for itself. Given that (a) there is a hardware warranty on the panels for 25 years, (b) at the time, the California net metering agreement was still available for new installs, and (c) the price to buy power down the wire was likely to increase beyond the rate of inflation, this seemed like a no brainer. And so it's turned out. I haven't kept as detailed records as Harold, but Sunpower's app does provide some data, from which it seems that the system actually paid for itself in around 5.5 years.

However, I'd speculate that the southwestern USA is about the best use case scenario for rooftop solar. We get a guaranteed 8-12 hours a day of bright sunlight, probably for around 300-320 days a year. Those panels produce at near maximum capacity for nearly half the hours in the day. In somewhere like Toronto, or most of northern Europe, for example, the output is going to be nothing like as good. Whereas scaling solar down to residential roof installations is commonplace, I've never seen the same thing done with birdie blenders, which would seem to me to be a better option for climates with more cloud cover and shorter days for half the year. There certainly isn't relentless advertising by contractors who want to put a wind turbine on your roof. HOAs would likely be a problem if that idea gained traction: rooftop solar panels are invisible from the street, but birdie blenders sticking 5-10 feet into the air certainly wouldn't be.

[Lyle Romer]

In relation to Harold's remarks about rooftop solar, we went in a similar direction, except that we had it installed when we bought the house in 2015, and specified a system that should cover all our routine consumption (an 8kW peak system). I did the math at the time, and concluded that given our likely power consumption and SoCal Edison's price for a kWH, the system would likely take 6-7 years to pay for itself. Given that (a) there is a hardware warranty on the panels for 25 years, (b) at the time, the California net metering agreement was still available for new installs, and (c) the price to buy power down the wire was likely to increase beyond the rate of inflation, this seemed like a no brainer. And so it's turned out. I haven't kept as detailed records as Harold, but Sunpower's app does provide some data, from which it seems that the system actually paid for itself in around 5.5 years.

However, I'd speculate that the southwestern USA is about the best use case scenario for rooftop solar. We get a guaranteed 8-12 hours a day of bright sunlight, probably for around 300-320 days a year. Those panels produce at near maximum capacity for nearly half the hours in the day. In somewhere like Toronto, or most of northern Europe, for example, the output is going to be nothing like as good. Whereas scaling solar down to residential roof installations is commonplace, I've never seen the same thing done with birdie blenders, which would seem to me to be a better option for climates with more cloud cover and shorter days for half the year. There certainly isn't relentless advertising by contractors who want to put a wind turbine on your roof. HOAs would likely be a problem if that idea gained traction: rooftop solar panels are invisible from the street, but birdie blenders sticking 5-10 feet into the air certainly wouldn't be.

Not to mention that when a turbine blade kills a bird in a field somewhere nobody notices and nature takes care of it. I don't think homeowners will like to keep finding dead birds on their roof or on the ground that fell from the roof.

[Leo Enticknap]

Good point. By the same token, campaigns to put speed cameras and/or bumps up in residential streets are often started by a single fatal (or serious injury-causing) road accident. Before that accident, the same residents who are now campaigning for cameras and humps previously hared down that road at 60mph without giving it a second thought.

It should be possible to design residential wind turbines that aren't as dangerous to birds as unprotected ones are, though, e.g. in a nacelle with a mesh screen on the intake end.

[Randy Stankey]

Speed bumps don't belong on public roads.
They damage cars, even those of law abiding drivers. They cause sudden changes in speed which increases the chances of an accident. They make it hard to plow the streets in the winter, making it more dangerous from ice and snow. They will need constant repair and upkeep or else chunks of pavement will fall away and cause even more damage.

Speed cameras are no better. They cost a lot to install and maintain. They often cost more than any money made from the fines they generate.
Further, if there isn't a human reviewing every single photograph to determine whether a citation is actually warranted, there are due process issues to consider. That increases the costs even more.

Further, speed bumps and cameras only have limited usefulness because drivers will slow down for the speed zone but, then, will go back to their original speed after they have passed it. Now, you have a situation where cars fly down the road at high speed, slow down or stop for a short time then go back to their original speed. That's more dangerous than having nothing at all!

Did you know that placing stop signs on residential streets just to slow down traffic might be against the traffic code?
I need to look it up again but I have read a rule which states that stop signs are for preventing collisions but NOT for calming traffic.

There is a new stop sign in my neighborhood, at a residential intersection where the neighbors complained about cars speeding down the road. The borough just put up a stop sign. The problem is that they could not show that the sign was to prevent collisions because the cross street has very little traffic and the whole intersection is completely visible. It is clear that the stop sign was placed there for "political" reasons, not for any real safety issue that couldn't be resolved by scheduling more police patrols in that area.

But people don't want to see the police. They just want a simple solution and they think that a stop sign is the way.
The problem is that the intersection in question is on an upward grade. In the winter, when the roads get slippery, cars have to stop and can't make it up the hill.

The better solution is to design better roads. If you make roads narrower, people will naturally drive slower. If you design in curves in strategic locations, people can't go as fast. If the roads are already built, painting lines down the center and along the sides will visually narrow the road and "trick" people into driving slower. Building sidewalks along the sides of the road, narrows the apparent road shoulder and does the same thing. Putting sign posts or collision-safe pickets close to the road completes the psychological effect.

If you ever get cited for not stopping at one of these "illegal" stop signs and you honestly missed it because it is new or you truly believe that you stopped but the cop was being overzealous (we have a lot of gung-ho "townies" around here) you can contest the citation and, if the municipality can not cite some logical reason for placing it, except to slow down traffic, the Justice will have to nullify the ticket.

That happened to somebody I know, at the intersection mentioned above. The guy went directly from the scene to the District Justice and complained.
He was a former township supervisor for the next town over and he knew the code by heart. He cited the rules and the Justice cancelled the ticket, on the spot.

Yet, the stop sign remains because people want it, even though it shouldn't be there in the first place.

[Frank Cox]

If you design in curves in strategic locations, people can't go as fast.

I used to know a guy who lived on the outside edge of a curve. He had endless problems with people missing that curve and driving into his front yard, sometimes right into the wall of his living room.

He looked into putting up a barrier (stone fence or something) along the street side of his yard but was told that if anyone drove into that he would be at fault for their injuries. So he just had to put up with ruts in his yard and occasional cars in his living room. Or move elsewhere and sell the house to the next mark.

[Randy Stankey]

Or put in a fish pond.

I wasn't talking about putting in a blind curve or something where people would go off the road.
More like a few shallow S-curves so that the driver can see that the road isn't straight and naturally slows down.

Most of the effect that we are going for is visual or psychological instead of being a physical obstacle.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I used to know a guy who lived on the outside edge of a curve. He had endless problems with people missing that curve and driving into his front yard, sometimes right into the wall of his living room.

He looked into putting up a barrier (stone fence or something) along the street side of his yard but was told that if anyone drove into that he would be at fault for their injuries. So he just had to put up with ruts in his yard and occasional cars in his living room. Or move elsewhere and sell the house to the next mark.

He should put 9 feet deep of gravel into his front yard and a bunch of tires in front of his living room. Also, he should install at least one camera and put the footage up on YouTube.

[Leo Enticknap]

Speed cameras are no better. They cost a lot to install and maintain. They often cost more than any money made from the fines they generate. Further, if there isn't a human reviewing every single photograph to determine whether a citation is actually warranted, there are due process issues to consider.

As long as the recipient of the penalty notice has the option of contesting it in court without unreasonable expense and bureaucracy, I wouldn't have thought that there would be a due process issue.

IMHO, speed cameras (and red light / stop sign cameras) are the least worst option, because they are the only method of reducing the impact (sorry!) of drivers not paying attention and/or deliberately deciding that the law doesn't apply to them, that doesn't punish the innocent along with the guilty. However, I would prefer an arrangement of two cameras placed, say, 100 yards apart (or further apart on roads with higher speed limits), and an average speed between the two being calculated. That way, you wouldn't cite someone who crept up to 27 in a 25 limit because his concentration was momentarily distracted by another hazard (for example), but you would catch someone who simply couldn't be bothered to observe the limit at all, or made the conscious decision to violate it.

Maybe different states and counties take different attitudes to stop signs. I take your point that they are one of the cheapest road safety measures to implement, and so the risk exists of them being used inappropriately. But certainly on all the regular routes I drive around Southern California, I can't think of any that are totally unnecessary.

[Harold Hallikainen]

IMHO, speed cameras (and red light / stop sign cameras) are the least worst option, because they are the only method of reducing the impact (sorry!) of drivers not paying attention and/or deliberately deciding that the law doesn't apply to them, that doesn't punish the innocent along with the guilty. However, I would prefer an arrangement of two cameras placed, say, 100 yards apart (or further apart on roads with higher speed limits), and an average speed between the two being calculated. That way, you wouldn't cite someone who crept up to 27 in a 25 limit because his concentration was momentarily distracted by another hazard (for example), but you would catch someone who simply couldn't be bothered to observe the limit at all, or made the conscious decision to violate it.

That was similar to the basis of a movie I watched in a high school math class introducing us to integrals. The movie used integrals to explain a speeding ticket on a toll road. A radar and a single camera is, however, quite a bit simpler than two spaced cameras which would probably require license plate readers to identify which car was which.

[Marcel Birgelen]

That was similar to the basis of a movie I watched in a high school math class introducing us to integrals. The movie used integrals to explain a speeding ticket on a toll road. A radar and a single camera is, however, quite a bit simpler than two spaced cameras which would probably require license plate readers to identify which car was which.

License plate detection isn't anything special anymore... most modern car parks and garages around here use it... I have my own opinions about the use of this particular technology, but it's kind of neat that you don't even have to provide a paid ticket to an automated barrier anymore and it opens up automatically for you...

The "two camera" system is nowadays littered around on an ever expanding number of stretches of roads in the Netherlands and Belgium... This used to be pretty bulky installations, but those modern cameras are barely noticeable anymore and look like ordinary security cameras. On some models, when it's dark, you can see some kind of UV flash, but more modern cameras probably use permanent infrared instead. They simply calculate your average speed within the zone they cover. The first of those systems started to appear as experimental systems in the late 1990s already, nowadays they're almost a pest...

Back in 2018 or so, I followed some lessons covering the BlackMagicDesign image capturing API. This also covered stuff like facial recognition, camera tracking based on facial recognition, license plate recognition, etc., which was really pretty easily implemented using their API...

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

That was similar to the basis of a movie I watched in a high school math class introducing us to integrals. The movie used integrals to explain a speeding ticket on a toll road. A radar and a single camera is, however, quite a bit simpler than two spaced cameras which would probably require license plate readers to identify which car was which.

There are those license plate cameras in a number of localities in Tennessee that I know of. Except Tennessee made a huge goof and painted the new plates Dark Blue with white letters. And so it goes that the IR cameras used only see the new plates as a dark rectangular blob in the image. Apparently they say the CCD's can not reproduce that part of the spectrum at all, plus they will have distributed 5.5 million new plates by the end of this year. With a population of 6.7 million, that means that most of the State's license plates can not be read. And the cost to replace the 4 cameras that are located at major intersections is several million per intersection. So expensive that they may just wait till new plates are issued again in 8 years.

https://newschannel9.com/news/local/...nition-cameras

[Bobby Henderson]

In Oklahoma the state legislature banned red light cameras in 2019. It's still very illegal to run a stop sign or red light (fines can be as much as $500).

Red light cameras were banned in Oklahoma for multiple reasons. One is accuracy. The cameras are not perfect. They are prone to falsely identifying vehicles in busy traffic and also prone to catch drivers already passing through in an intersection on a yellow light. Speed cameras can also falsely ID vehicles in heavy traffic. Local police departments and the Highway Patrol will set up warning displays showing the posted speed limit and an electronic reading of what should be your vehicle's speed as it approaches the sign. Speeders are still typically caught via a cop or state trooper using some kind of radar or laser-based device.

Even RFID tag reading systems aren't perfect. I have a PikePass account thru Oklahoma Turnpike Authority. Apparently the turnpike system has hundreds of mis-reads daily. I've had to dispute errors on my account; a toll charge would pop up in another part of the state where I wasn't driving. There wouldn't be any hits on any turnpikes leading to that location. I even had one charge dispute due to a motorist having a license plate similar but not exact as mine. Thankfully the OTA doesn't put up any fuss about reversing a charging error.

I would expect the RFID tag reading technology to improve as well as the technology for reading license plates and other identifying vehicle/driver data. I honestly expect a much greater proliferation of surveillance cameras, license plate readers and RFID toll tag readers. Some of that might be to fight crime. I think most of the push will come via the short-fall in how highways and streets are funded. It's possible at some point in the future motorists will be paying tolls on more than just turnpikes.

[Lyle Romer]

I think most of the push will come via the short-fall in how highways and streets are funded. It's possible at some point in the future motorists will be paying tolls on more than just turnpikes.

Just replace all gas taxes (federal, state and local) with a cost per mile added onto your yearly registration fee. If automakers were so inclined, a digital odometer which can not be rolled back could be integrated into new vehicles so people can't cheat.

[Bobby Henderson]

If I am going to pay a toll for everywhere I drive I would extremely prefer just paying the fee up front. Getting hit with a huge bill once a year would absolutely suck. Too many Americans are financially illiterate and cannot plan their budgets to weather a big, once yearly bill that will vary depending on how much they drive. Gasoline taxes are included in the purchase of fuel due to this reason. If motorists are getting hit with highway and street use tolls up front the overall cost will hit them in a far more gradual manner. And it could do more to make motorists consolidate their daily trips and drive less.

[Lyle Romer]

If I am going to pay a toll for everywhere I drive I would extremely prefer just paying the fee up front. Getting hit with a huge bill once a year would absolutely suck. Too many Americans are financially illiterate and cannot plan their budgets to weather a big, once yearly bill that will vary depending on how much they drive. Gasoline taxes are included in the purchase of fuel due to this reason. If motorists are getting hit with highway and street use tolls up front the overall cost will hit them in a far more gradual manner. And it could do more to make motorists consolidate their daily trips and drive less.

Good point. Maybe do some kind of monthly fee estimate that estimates high and then you get a refund with your registration like a tax refund works.