Auto auto fleets to dodge British potholes in future A Highways Agency report suggests that cars of the future could report road potholes automatically, with fleets of auto autos being instructed to swerve around them without human intervention. The Strategic Road Network Initial Report suggested these vehicles could be used to automatically report defects in roads back to …
"A Highways Agency report suggests that cars of the future could report road potholes automatically,"
Are Human Beings no longer capable of producing the same effort ? At no cost other the development of a simple GPS location tracking and Pothole Detected button !!
And will it actually make the repairs of said Potholes any quicker....
When everything becomes automatic will there been any need to actually leave your bed ? Maybe in the near "Matrix" style future, we will have plugs in our arses which will deliver the power to all these some much needed automates....
Call me anything but please don't call me sarcastic... It makes me upset, tightens up my sphincter and I can no longer provide the power to my El Reg auto-reply bot..
but they automatically report defects in roads back to maintenance contractors.
It's the best advancement of time saving for the human race I've seen since the invention of the washing machine.
No longer will people have to report pot holes to the council, think of all the time that will be saved by everyone.
Then at the council they can file it in the same place they do now and do f*ck all.
Absolute genius.
is a total and absolute waste of time.
I regularly see yellow or red or white paint marking road defects yet bugger all is done about it.
The defect marking is obviously used by the responsible council/authority to say, 'we know about this' and that is as far as it goes.
My road is just repairs upon repairs upon repairs. The newest ones are the ones that go to crap the quickest.
Then there is all that anti-skid surface that flakes off after a couple of years.
That is a good point. I am wont, especially early on Sunday mornings, to go for long runs which necessarily involve long stretches along footpathless country roads. Now I accept that autonomous cars are some years away from being able to navigate same but sometimes tech can move fast.
In such situations you run facing the traffic though if a car is heading head on to you there is the option of swapping sides rather than risking an ankle injury by taking to the verge. But if as part of that one has to scan the integrity of the road surface ahead, around blind bends and to absolutely know the driver is a robot system then I'm going to need to be accompanied on such runs by a an autonomous drone who looks ahead while I wear smart specs with HUD on them. I shudder to think what such a system will cost me.
In addition part of my route with the majority of my long runs goes beside an Army training establishment where they do live firing training. Running along the cycle path trailing a drone may well be perceived as a risk and/or violate some vital statute. Maybe the drone could land and fold itself into hat mode?
There is a big advantage, I could slip into the Zone but still get warned by the approach of a cyclist. I have been rudely shaken out of the Zone on occasion by a frantically ringing bell. Thus far I have managed to leap in the right direction. My hearing is very sensitive to the sound of bike wheels and bike bells. When I'm walking with my wife on the paths I'm ushering her to the side before she is aware of why.
"Are Human Beings no longer capable of producing the same effort ?"
Four Thousand Holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
It referred to potholes. Quite appropriately if article's claims were true that the Beatles smoked a lot of pot during the making of Sergeant Pepper.
"Are Human Beings no longer capable of producing the same effort ?"
Capable? Sure. Actually willing to do so? For the most part, absolutely not. Do you really think that all drivers report every pothole they encounter? The vast majority never report anything at all, and even those who do only do so for the worst ones that actually cause serious problems. Having the state of roads automatically monitored and reported on a continuous basis would be a huge improvement on waiting for people to sue when things get bad enough to damage their cars. The main problem is with this part:
"Are Human Beings no longer capable of producing the same effort ?"
No, it won't. Road maintenance is the responsibility of local councils, but their budgets are only a small fraction of the amount required to actually maintain roads in a decent state. And indeed, due to sustained under-funding, the last time road budgets hit the news it was reported that even if budgets were increased enough to actually fix things, it would take an average of something like 80 years to actually get it all done.
Basically, using consumer cars to monitor road conditions isn't a terrible idea in terms of seeing what the problem is, but will do absolutely nothing to actually help fix the problem because that's ultimately just a matter of funding.
"even if budgets were increased enough to actually fix things, it would take an average of something like 80 years to actually get it all done."
Assuming traditional reporting and repair methods(*), yes.
(*) Potholes reported. Contractor goes out and fixes one pothole per day in each section of road before driving to another section and repeating - that way they get paid the maximum possible for repairs. Travel, setup and teardown times factor heavily into the delay equation.
I followed a jetpatcher out on trial one day - it did an entire 2 mile stretch of heavily potholed lane in an afternoon and the repairs show no sign of breaking up after more than a year. The previous time this road was patched it took in excess of 3 months, only about half the potholes were filled and they were breaking up within weeks.
Yet another load of answers looking for questions.... Do people get paid to write this crap? Do we need automated reporting of pothole location - just drive down any street and they are right there in front of you.
And to think we will have automated cars swerving left, right and centre to avoid them?
Please stop now, my head is hurting. This is not an excuse for IoT and connected technology, it's another excuse for incompetent government agencies and bone idleness of their so called staff and contractors.
...but I take "The Strategic Road Network Initial Report suggested these vehicles could be used to automatically report defects in roads back to maintenance contractors – as well as warning other connected vehicles to avoid the damaging carriageway flaws." to mean that they won't bother with the expensive former action, and will instead just leave it the cheap latter. The future's bright, the future's - puking furiously as your wondrous autonomous vehicle swerves around an unrepaired pothole every couple of metres.
Don't know about the UK, but here in Michigan pothole dodging while avoiding other vehicles also dodging potholes is the state sport and expecting them to be repaired after reporting them is the state joke.
Somehow, I'm haunted by a vision of autonomous cars dodging potholes that strongly resembles a demolition derby or the Dodge-Em ride at the carnival.
"To increase your priority ($50) please tap here"
Do they also have a "to ignore the (motor)cyclist in the space you are going to swerve into ($150) please tap here" option? Or is that going to be the default?
The vehicle lidar may well be able to see the motorbike (which is, after all, a fairly big chunk of metal) but I doubt very much whether a cyclist will give much of a backscatter for the LIDAR unit to see.. And if it hasn't seen the squishy meatbag on wheels, then it'll consider that space available for swerving into.
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better still, if the car reporting could do the repairing. And the cherry on top - AT A COST TO SOMEBODY ELSE, SAY... the driver. That would be true advancement for the road system. No, wait, I've got a better one, if the car reporting it did NOT repair it but the driver STILL has to pay. Yes, we're nearing the state of perfection. Looking around... hell, we're ALREADY IN!!! :)
The biggest problem with potholes is the way they repair them, bunging a bit of tarmac in and levelling it off doesn’t seal the gap.
Water gets between the patch and the rest of the road. Freezes and they pushes the patch out. Result a few months later it has to be done again.
Cycling and also owning a car that sits only 60mm of the road (kit car not that exotic) those holes can really ruin your day.
Better to have a database which flags road x has been patched y times so resurface it properly....
But smart roads, just stick a microphone at the side and listen for the bang as a car goes though.
Solution looking for a problem if you ask me
"Water gets between the patch and the rest of the road. Freezes and they pushes the patch out. Result a few months later it has to be done again."
That's a system designed for the job security of repair crews.
I've seen so many similar examples in my time in industry that it seems to be hard wired into human nature. My favourite was a machine with a lot of microswitches which were constantly being broken by clumsy operators trying to get broken bits out. The maintenance crew soldered the switches in place. When someone tried to introduce switches with little plugs which could be replaced very quickly, amazingly they proved so unreliable they were dropped. Some of the maintenance men were "working" 80 hour weeks with double time on Sunday and time and a half outside office hours.
Solution looking for a problem if you ask me
The solution is there.... just fix the roads. The problem is the idiots in charge and the ones actually doing the repairs. They seem to have better things to do, like talk on the cell phone, lean on their shovels and watch traffic. Manglement wants lunch, meetings, more money and of course, the benefits and status of "being in charge without doing anything".
"Jet Patching != Permanent repair"
True, but they're far more permanent than the crap jobs most brutish councils do (which are also temporary repairs, but rather _more_ temporary).
Given that it might take a _decade_ or more between a pothole being reported and _permanent_ repairs being made there's a lot of milage in temporary repairs that last for more than 2 weeks.
"The biggest problem with potholes is the way they repair them, bunging a bit of tarmac in and levelling it off doesn’t seal the gap."
Having seen them in action (and the results of their repairs holding up for a few years), I believe jetpatchers (when operated correctly) solve that issue nicely (and fill most potholes in less than 5 minutes whilst doing a better/more durable job than a roading gang does in 2-3 hours)
In a lot of cases potholes keep opening up because the roadbed itself is fucked. When Cock lane in Surrey (yes really, it's near Bookham) got redone a couple of years back it was found that the roadbed was utterly waterlogged and what was supposed to be a simple £5k resurfacing job turned into a £250k+++ job as the road had to be completely rebuilt from the foundations up.
http://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/cock-lane-crusader-giant-penis-11729269
During the rebuild a significant number of roadside drains were uncovered. It seems that contractors have a bad habit of sealing over the gratings when resurfacing the road and they never get uncovered again, which is how the roadbed ended up so waterlogged. The road now has 5 times as many drains as it used to, but no new ones have actually been installed.
Perhaps the survey vehicles need to run metal detectors and flag when they find a mass at the edge of the road but no grating on the surface - there's also the point that not enough attention is being paid to drains - it's a lot cheaper to keep these flowing than pay out to fix potholes.
"The biggest problem with potholes is the way they repair them, bunging a bit of tarmac in and levelling it off doesn’t seal the gap.
Water gets between the patch and the rest of the road. Freezes and they pushes the patch out. "
You can fix that with a covering of tar and chippings to seal over the filling. So - council tars and chips the road, potholes and all. Then council comes along again and fills in the potholes on top of the tar and chip layer.
covering of tar and chippings to seal
Like they (used to?[1]) do in France? When they resurface the road, they then cover it with a layer of grit which is (I suspect) designed to be pushed into the road surface by traffic in order to make the surface more durable.
Which can cause a few buttock-clenching moments on a motorbike when you go round a corner at foreign-biking-holiday speeds[2] only to discover that the road ahead is covered with a 2 CM deep layer of grit..
Motorbikes and grit really, really don't work together well. Unless you have dirt bike tyres.
[1] Haven't been to France on a motorbike for about 15 years.
[2] What was France like? Green and blurry.. After all, their speed limit signs are in MPH right?
@Mark 85: Usually around the driving routes of those who have power and influence.
And herein lies an important enhancement of the product: It should be installed only on the vehicles of those who have power and influence. This is essential to reach the goal that a large percentage of reported potholes should be fixed within a specified period of time. Without this enhancement the proposed feature will not be effective.
But have you ever noticed that there some places the potholes are always fixed promptly? Usually around the driving routes of those who have power and influence.
Unfortunately far too true:
A few years back I used to regularly drive past the County Hall in Hertford and doing the same route at the same time every day you tend to come across the same drivers. One of these was pretty much a criminal hazard behind the wheel and every day would pull blindly out of their property (just North of Waterford which is the next village to the North of Hertford) into traffic expecting every other road user to get out of the way or stop. This level of road danger was then repeated on all roundabouts, weaving across lanes onto, around and off each roundabout all the way until they got to their place of work...
The driver of this vehicle was a senior local councillor, with their own allocated parking space at the front of the County Hall of course. Complaints? All that happened was that miraculously a considerably slower speed limit zone was erected that covered just the entrance to this cretin's property. Apparently it was a danger area due to the number of collisions and near collisions in the area. Almost all caused by one particular driver of course.
I still have flashbacks when I see cars of the same make, model and colour...
"Of course, if the government wanted to avoid pollution or monetize this...
They'd instruct the cars to drive through the potholes, or make you pay an extra $50 a month to enable the optional pothole-avoidance algorithm"
No, that's a Microsoft car
One little side effects is that the local authority would know about a pothole pretty much as soon as it occurs ... and therefor be liable for any damage it causes. At present, if nobody has bothered to report a hole, the LA is not liable as it doesn't know about it and therefor is not negligent in making a timely repair.
"At present, if nobody has bothered to report a hole, the LA is not liable as it doesn't know about it and therefor is not negligent in making a timely repair."
Exactly. Nothing gets done about things that cost you, the taxpayer, money.
There's an estimated hundred thousand or so prolific criminals that steal to feed their drug habits. They steal anything up to a coupe of hundred thousands worth of stuff each every year, but they are not a problem because the taxpayer pays through house and car insurance. If politicians and police had their pay docked for failing to deal with the problem, it would get fixed.
As it is, police cuts while demanding that more things be policed just guarantees that crimes that cost the ordinary citizen will continue to attract less attention than ones which impact important people. Like the ones that can buy Range Rovers and simply ignore potholes.
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