Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I wonder if someone will develop a model where the petrol engine is a module that can come in out of the car - leaving a cavity like the boot. Would be fairly heavy to get out I guess, but it really doesn't make sense to haul around the engine when you're not using it.
Heh, just for added complexity on the world's most complicated road vehicle! Simpler would be to own two cars, one with ICE, one without. Then, instead of moving the motor, you simply move your body with your built-in feet from one vehicle to the other. Has the added advantage that both pieces will drive, so when you run out of charge miles away from home, the petrol vehicle can perform a rescue mission.
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Marvel's Wolverine put it best for me: "Terrorist is just what the big army calls the little army".
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Whenever a big name like this passes, I get to wondering how exceptional they really were, or whether they were mostly a product of their times. In this case, I just don't know, but it seems to me that if it wasn't Thatcher it would have been someone else. Reagan was pulling the same crap in the US, and it's not like he was some genius. He also got put on a pedestal post-mortem. Monetarism was (and still is) a massive team effort, and the pedestalization is a form of auto-back patting. So powerful that in NZ it was a set of reforms initiated by the goddamned Labour Party.
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A bit of blue, but a lot of mirage, just for Lilith. From Cheltenham Beach. Tamaki Drive can't be seen at all, the whole cliffline disappears into the sea. And check out the left-most yacht. It was a scorching hot, humid day, hence the sad lack of blue in the sky.
ETA: Mind you, given those cliffs are probably Ladies Bay, it's not surprising Tamaki Drive can't be seen, since it's to the right of the shot :-(
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Hard News: Neither fish nor fowl, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Of course, but if that rule actually mattered terribly much we wouldn’t have dozens of people dying every year in intersection crashes.
If it didn't matter, we might have thousands of people dying. Any angry idiot in a big truck out to make a point could kill people who failed to notice their picky rule of choice.
it’s entirely conceivable that a person legitimately turning right who did know the rule might end up arguing with the left-turner’s driver’s door
Yes, it's conceivable. More likely, the right turner would slow down to avoid the collision. They would most likely be actually looking directly at the left turner during the turn, if only to be sure that they were in fact indicating a turn, rather than having forgotten to cancel their indicator. This would be simply prudent to avoid the real danger, a high speed head-on vs angled collision. Experienced drivers do this as a matter of course, because forgetting to cancel an indicator is really common, something the road code doesn't cover, except with, as I said before, the really important rule, to avoid accidents at all costs.
Nowhere near as rare as you'd suspect. Top of Mortimer Pass in Newmarket springs immediately to mind.
Google Streetview shows Mortimer Pass as a single lane at the top. Has this changed?
I'm wracking my memory to come up with any other examples. Usually when a four lane carriageway crosses a four lane carriageway (dual or not), there's a traffic light or a roundabout to control the intersection, or free turns with other lane segregations. This is quite an old on-ramp, on an old bridge, which is probably why it doesn't follow standard.
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Hard News: Illegal Tender, in reply to Ross Bell,
Half made a net financial gain and the other half a loss.
LOL, that does make sense. How many dealers aren't also heavy users?
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Hard News: Neither fish nor fowl, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Fortunately this isn’t one of those arguments. I freely admit Matthew is correct. My consultation of the road code before I posted just didn’t find the section on one-way roads, but I can see it’s clear now.
It’s a great example of why I think there should be, at minimum, mandatory “must pass” road rules testing every time you have to renew your licence.
Actually, it’s a very poor example. I have not become significantly safer for knowing this. Knowledge of that detail of law is trumped in the safety stakes by the far more general rule that one should drive to avoid accidents. Since in this case, both vehicles can easily see each other, they would really have to want to crash to actually do so. And anyone who deliberately crashes into another car is in the wrong automatically. There is room to avoid collision, since there are two lanes.
The cyclist as a vehicle clearly makes the entire situation completely different from that rule, since there is no way it is correct that a cyclist turning at that intersection must take the right lane of the on-ramp.
Ironically, this law actually makes cyclists much less safe in this situation, since it means they really are holding up traffic behind them, in the situation of a stream of traffic making left turns on the on-ramp blocking them from accessing the cycleway. Drivers who know this rule will be honking at them, and they may feel pressured to do something foolish, or to shrink to the edge of the island and let traffic pass behind them. They are safer from the people who don’t know the rule, who will think they have to wait anyway.
This law remains the same with regard to this though has always seemed to be little known so I was on occasion let through.
Yes, I had no memory of it. I don’t recall the codes from the 80s having any specific mention of different rules of right of way for 2-way entries into two-lane roads, and I’m not surprised – it just doesn’t seem like a rule that would cause much trouble from failing to know it. People would see that it’s the best thing to do, and if they have any level of experience, would probably make the turn with caution, slowly, or staggered with the other vehicle, just in case the other person doesn’t know the rule.
Also, I speculate, it’s quite rare to find an uncontrolled intersection of this kind. It is a stupid design, as right turning traffic can be held up indefinitely anyway, by the oncoming traffic going straight, and will hold up their entire lane behind them. To even have two lanes going onto the ramp indicates that high volume is expected. Which is so, it’s very busy in the evening rush hour. There should be traffic lights there. Which would also be much safer for cyclists, and pedestrians.
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Hard News: Neither fish nor fowl, in reply to Russell Brown,
That is what people do all the time at that intersection, though. It seems to work well.
Sure, but that is an example of cooperative driving, rather like the "merge like a zip" thing. A bit like letting people out of side roads, it's people making traffic work, when the rules aren't helping.
ETA: To make it clearer what I'm contending, I don't think that the traffic turning right does actually have right of way. But the left turning traffic can see that there's no real loss to them by enabling the flow. If a left turner did, for some reason, decide they must have the right lane, the right turners would have to yield to them. Up until last year, the tables were turned. Left turners had to be sure that the right turner was taking the right lane - if there was a crash they would be at fault. But the right turner would have to be an idiot to want to take the left lane.
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Hard News: Neither fish nor fowl, in reply to anth,
Actually as there are two lanes on the off ramp, with one lane from each direction to feed them, both left and right turning vehicles have right of way to the lane closest to them. This law remains the same with regard to this though has always seemed to be little known so I was on occasion let through.
That sounds dangerously counterintuitive. How would either car know which lane the other wanted to turn into? There is no compulsion whatsoever when turning to choose the closest lane. You just have to indicate three seconds before the turn. If what you are saying is true, I would expect to see very clear markings on the road to signify it, like a guiding curve.
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Good summary. And yes, Bryce's was epic. I almost needed a lie down after poring through it.
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