Pay as you drive

If i remember correctly the infomation given by the government of the day highlighted only closer trade links , it never highlighted the uk being rulled from brussels nor did it highlight the expected integration that governments wanted

Agreed. A great deal of general haulage is run on trampers running 12 - 14 hours a day and 'day drivers' working 10 - 12 hour days, bringing the truck back into the depot and a night driver taking out the same truck for his

10 - 12 shift.

Supermarket and Department store companies deliver non-restricted stores at night, but as a huge amount are restricted, for differing reasons, these deliveries have to be made during the day. To down a truck during rush hours would need more trucks/drivers to cover the same work, hence increased costs which would be passed on to you and me.

krystnors

Steve Robinson ( snipped-for-privacy@colevalleyinteriors.co.uk) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

And nor are we.

Unfortunately, we're not exactly ruled from the Palace of Westminster currently, either.

Yep but an LCD display would add to the costs and they wouldnt want that.

Its not the display algorithm that causes the problem, the actual calculations are adaptive to get better accuracy. When youre cruising along at 50 the screen updates 1Hz and the algorithm calculating your speed is averaging your speed over the last few seconds. The more accurate the speed reading the more it has to take repeated samples whch takes time. If you rapidly change speed the averaging effects give a delay.

I can, very easily, get from 30-0 at lights and glance at the GPS to see its still on 15mph as i stop, and thats not stopping harshly. Theres just no way they could enforce it. Plus in built up areas and mountainous/tree lined areas the signal goes to pot - theyd have to have 100% coverage or it is as good as useless. It takes 30-60 seconds to warm up and aquire signals on most modern GPS systems. In 60 seconds you can have travelled a long way, half asleep, with no big brother. With inaccuracies and gaps in cover like this they would be loopholes waiting to happen in law. They really are only any good at measuring relatively constant speed and tracking a general route.

Many can though that aren't.

Sounds nice, but 7.00 til 3.00 is still far more common.

Only jobs that can't be flexi time are shift work where the task is already being done by someone else. Most of those change shift at times outside the rush hour.

If banks can learn to open longer hours and run with more flexible staff hours any business or office can.

Rush hour is down to schools. It's not possible to stagger class starts as the pupils that arrive by bus all get there at about the same time. It's not economic to run more buses with fewer pupils on each one. People who take their kids to school don't want to start work until they have taken the kids to school. You only have to see the reduction in traffic during school hols to see the effect.

The biggest snarl ups are always at junctions where a large amount of traffic makes a right turn. Right turns require filter lanes and a dedicated period in traffic light sequence. Straight on and left turns can be made by opposing flows allowing lots more vehicles though in any given time. Need more schemes that ban right turns and replace them with 3 left turns.

-- Peter Hill Spamtrap reply domain as per NNTP-Posting-Host in header Can of worms - what every fisherman wants. Can of worms - what every PC owner gets!

Andy Cap (Andy snipped-for-privacy@nosuch.co.uk) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

I disagree.

The Common Market was all about giving free access to all European member markets to all goods and services. That has to include free movement of workers between states, and it has to include commonality of regulation and legislation - to a certain extent - between states.

Sure, there's aspects of the commonality of regulation and legislation which have gone way beyond that - and could certainly be perceived as going way beyond desirable - but they're not what you're complaining about here.

You'd pay (say) 1000/year for every peak congestion period (say 8-9,

5-6) you are in (on congested roads).

If this succeeds in moving 20% of the traffic off the roads in these periods, then you have effectively decreased the rush hour traffic by

20%, and vastly decreased jams.

If you also make it free to drive if there are 2 or more people in the car, this will also help reduce traffic loading.

Free park/ride bus services paid for by congestion tolls on the routes in question may also help.

Several points. If you average forward in time, as well as backward, this significantly increases the accuracy of the calculations. This is useless in terms of display, but just fine for position/speed/accelleration logging.

GPS doesn't really compute a position, then from that position, compute a speed.

It measures the differences in ranges, and the difference in rates those ranges are changing between satellites to compute a position solution. The satellites are moving towards and away from the reciever at anything up to a couple of kilometers a second. The raw output of this process is a position/speed/heading, the speed is not seperately calculated.

The smoothing that's then applied is the key. Buried deep in the (often unpublished) specs are specifications for maximum accelleration, and maximum change in accelleration. In many recievers I've seen specs for, these are really quite high - you pretty much need an F1 car, with really, really large aerosurfaces, going at speed to approach them.

And GPS inaccuracy isn't a problem either, as the GPS reciever knows if it's inaccurate, and for insurance purposes, you don't care if the driver accellerates/brakes sharply once, you care if they do it all the time.

Not to mention the fact that a 2 quid accellerometer will tell you about accelleration/braking in real time, and a 10 quid package will get you the ones that are doing drifts round corners.

AIUI Ireland is a rural, sparsely populated country with relatively few opportunities for immigrants. It's changing though, so maybe one day they will have the same problems we do. All things being equal though, immigrants will tend to opt for English speaking countries, and in particular UK and the US/Canada. The UK is convenient as it is the cheapest and arguably the easiest for immigrants from the EU and even the ME to get to and obtain residence.

Morse

Some of us don't have _any_ choice in the hours we work; we are those teachers that teach/babysit eveybody else's offspring.

So in effect, not cutting congestion, just moving to to residential roads which are less suitable to cope with it.

More or less what I do already - having tried many routes to work I have realied that avoiding motorway junctions and link roads (not necessarily the motorway itself) significantly reduces the amount of congestion I encounter. The recently improved A38 J28 westbound being a notable exception.

Conor ( snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

I've met scaffold poles with a better grasp of English than several contributors here...

Anyway there would be nothing to claim. Road pricing will be on mileage not time taken or congestion caused.

-- Peter Hill Spamtrap reply domain as per NNTP-Posting-Host in header Can of worms - what every fisherman wants. Can of worms - what every PC owner gets!

I regularly drive a vehicle that is fitted with a GPS locator, and have sat in the control room and watched the information been updated. Updates are of the order of 30 seconds, and using that there is no way at all of knowing how you where driving. There is a second data logger fitted that allows them to reconstruct pretty much every detail of the last few weeks driving (I know it`s been read 2 weeks after an incident for example). And to be honerst no I don`t mind that at all. I`d rather have that and a reduction in the number of idiots who (taking an example from my drive home today) drive down lane 2 of a motorway at 45mph, ignoging everyone beeping and flashing them to move over.

If it was going to cost (say) £500 or £1000 more for a 9AM delivery than an

8AM delivery, it starts getting to the point where it might be cheaper to have the delivery early and get a few staff in early to deal with it. It would create a bit more room for cars in the rush hour period. Building more roads isn`t the answer, as they get filled as soon as you build them. MOV car lanes could well be the answer if they where policed correctly - the vast majority of people driving at rush hour are one up in their vehicle - if you can convince a small fraction of those drivers to car share then you`d have a lot of cars brough off the roads in rush hour.

I`m curious to know what people suggest as a way to reduce congestion long term. The roads are going to gridlock sooner rather than later, as anyone who drives regularly in rush hour can tell you. For a lot of people (myself included) public transport simply isn`t an option, but the times that I drive to and from work the roads are empty anyway - this would be similar for most people not working standard 9-5 style hours.

30s is just a limitation imposed on the broadcasting system. 30s today, 30ms tomorrow, trust me, these systems can be expanded in all sorts of ways. I don't mind businesses imposing these systems on their employees, but as a private individual in a supposedly free country, the government is not my boss. Z

The trouble is it'll only be an additional £40-£50 if you work on £1/mile during peak hours. At that level, customers won't and the big supermarkets, who are the companies most inflexible about delivery times, will simply use their might to pass it back to the supplier.

STOP THE "MUST BE IN THE SOUTH EAST" and start spreading companies and business locations around the country. There are huge areas of the UK where there's bugger all congestion.

Work from home. Multiple Occupancy express lanes.

People have already shown that ramping up the cost of motoring won't deter them.

I reckon ultimately it'll solve itself as the sheer expense of living and operating in the most congested areas becomes too much.