Status: Weird News
Chicago's transportation department has announced that they're going to try an interesting experiment to try to get people to slow down on a notoriously hazardous curve. They're going to
use an optical illusion:
The yellow warning signs mounted along the road in recent years telling drivers to take the curve at 25 m.p.h. have had little or no effect. So the city has decided to try something new. In a few weeks, dozens of new pavement stripes will be laid down. At first they’ll be 16-feet apart, but as drivers get closer to the curve, the stripes will only be eight feet apart. "They provide an optical illusion that vehicles are actually speeding up and that causes motorists to slow down, which is of course, the intended effect that we’re trying to have at that location," said Steele.
Unfortunately there's no video of what this optical illusion effect looks like (the new stripes haven't been painted yet), but when I read this I immediately thought that if you combined the speeding optical illusion with
randomly moving yellow lines, you could really mess with people's minds.
Comments
http://tinyurl.com/qhkew
It must work, because I've driven over that a bunch of times and always thought they were evenly spaced -- it didn't click that they got closer until I read StarLizard's comment!
Many curves here have black and white chevron boards all the way along them, but the chevrons are evenly spaced.
Near Vancouver, British Columbia, they are spending about $500 million to redo the highway that runs north to the Whistler ski resort which will be the site of the 2010 Olympics. That highway is notorious for regular deadly accidents because it is narrow and windy for much of its 100 km length.
The reason for all the accidents is simply excessive speed. Radar traps and warning signs don't seem to stop it. They really should be revoking drivers' licences and impounding cars for years but the government seems reluctent to do that. Instead, the highway is blamed. So now the taxpayer is on the hook for half a billion dollars so skiers can get to the slopes 10 minutes faster on Friday night.
In fact, I remember seeing a segment on an old BBC TV show - about 30 years ago - ("This Week in Britain") that showed the original experiments somewhere in southern England and how well it all worked.
It's very effective.
I find this comment interesting. In Germany the speed trap, definitely has a "trap" feel to it, in my opinion. For example, I understand, it is illegal to warn other drivers, via gestures, that the police are around the next corner measuring speed. Definitely you should observe speed signs, but in an unfamiliar area it's possible to get caught out, because you missed the speed sign, for example. Also often speed changes are indicated by the colour of a place sign, not by a digit on a sign, as a foreigner you need to get used to it.
In the U.K. speed cameras are often heavily "advertised" via numerous road signs. Sometimes I've seen many many speed camera signs and not noticed an actual device. I find this method much more effective in reducing speed, rather than trying to catch people doing a misdeed.