I think so, but the idea is not to add more, it is simmply to avoid having one red light after another when driving along a major road at night. Leave them on green, flashing amber on the side roads and treat the flashing ambers as stop signs. You'd only need the lights to be operating normally where two major roads meet.
SteveW
The thing that always gets is the priority rule on roundabouts - though most of the main ones have priority signs that make then analogous to ours.
Around my way the local council spent 10s millions improving some road junctions. One of the improved roundabouts works well with free flowing traffic. How did they achieve this miracle? The changed the timing of the traffic lights on the roads leading to this roundabout so now cars are filtered a dozen at a time. To justify the expense all they really did was to move the half mile of queues further up the road. Journey times are now longer.
The other improvement was to replace a busy roundabout with a T junction with lights. Unfortunately to turn right you have to navigate 5 sets of unsynchronised lights in a distance of around 300 metres. 2 sets of lights give priority to buses crossing over the main road and they still sequence even if there are no buses to cross.
The council now seem surprised that traffic into the town centre to use the shops has fallen.
Nothing of the sort dense - shows how little you understand
charles wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@charleshope.demon.co.uk:
I have wondered if it is possible to link the upward and the downward escalator to reduce the power by counterbalancing the loads.
Old idea!
Been in a Paris multi-storey supermarket with escalators which take your shopping trolley up and down too. It looked very old though.
A couple of supermarkets locally (Tesco in Leicester, Asda in Nottingham) have fitted a mezzanine floor with a shallow sloping escalator that takes trolleys, some form of magnetic lock in the wheel stops them rolling backwards.
Very common in the UK - a travelator.
Asda, Makro et al have 'em.
Two shops in our town centre have them - Sainsbury and Tesco.
In Tesco, it makes a bit of a rumbly noise.
In Sainsbury they are fitted with loudspeakers which bark out "Prepare to push the trolley off" and similar announcements, at high volume. Where there are four of these (two up, two down in two flights), in a very echoic entrance area (all hard plaster/concrete/glass), it is quite deafening.
They do seem to have reduced the volume a bit - but it would have made quite a good scene in a film where the protagonist is going through a paranoid episode in some dystopian future. Oh - it was the present...
Presumably this constitutes a "good idea from overseas" if you're the sort of person that thinks shooting schoolgirls in the head is a "good idea":
Yes - the Victorians were sensible about balancing the loads. Where I worked there was a Paternoster Elevator which was very effective (though intimidating for the new employees). My point was only about escalators.
Not magnetic. The trolleys have narrow tires that slip down between grooves in the tread plates to allow serations on the bottom of the axles to engage with similar serrations on the tread plates. Look at the tires on your next visit.
In the ones I've seen, the edges of the wheels are ridged and the ridges drop into slots in the escalator surface.
They don't need a magnetic lock. They just have wheels where the rotating bit drops into the slots and the none rotating bit then rests on the ridges, simples.
Well, our local Makro *had* one. They've completely closed the upper floor now ....
The one I've seen is a parallel escalator which runs next to the pedestrian one. It has claws which grip the bottom framework, and the trolly runs in tracks on it's own wheels, AFAICR, but is held horizontally. It goes slightly slower than the pedstrian escalator, so you can push your trolley in, and then just about beat it getting to the other end so you can pull it out. I remember thinking that I couldn't imagine this getting past UK H&S...
I think a lot could be improved about our traffic lights, although I can't get excited about countdowns.
Many years ago, I was trying to explain our traffic signals to a visitor from the US, and I hadn't realised how complex they are until that moment, because I take them for granted.
The concept of filters, and also the concept that a green light doesn't mean your path is free across the junction (e.g. when turning right across oncoming traffic). This made me contrast the UK and US signals, and I decided theirs are much clearer and less ambiguous. I really like their flashing red and flashing amber signals which many signals revert to out of busy hours, something I ponder when I'm sitting at a red light for ages in the UK and there's no other traffic within half a mile of the junction at 1am. Direction arrows on red and amber too, rather than just green, would seem to be clearer for those not so used to our system.
Way back when I worked for GEC, UK traffic signals all dimmed at night to avoid glare. Over the last 10 years or so, I'm seeing many new ones which clearly don't do this. This seems like a backwards step - maybe it was an extra-cost option councils have decided not to pay for?
Also seeing increasing use of lights which all park on red when they see a gap in the traffic, so traffic on a main road is forced to almost stop, before the lights go green and let it through (Reading has several new sets like this). Really buggers up my fuel economy ratings, even when driving through at night with empty roads. Don't know if this is deliberate, or just badly programmed system. If they'd put the inductive pickup far enough in advance, the lights could have changed to green by the time you got there if you were within the speed limit, but no, they don't do that because the first loop is too near the junction.
One of the bugbears about traffic lights is precisely the positioning of the inductive loops. Many were placed before "they" decided to have the bicycle reserved bits. Now, they are out of optimum position by the length of the cyclists' box. There is one near here at which you regularly see traffic building up because the car at front of queue is a very small distance short and so are not registered.
I'd bet it's deliberate. Remember - discouraging car use is saving the planet.
One US feature which we'll never see here, is the turn-right-on-red system. Not appropriate everywhere (as indeed in the US, where there are clear signs where it's not allowed). But it could help ease traffic.
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