[trailrunner]

I do have a white and green Castelli jersey, and I haven’t sold my TT bike yet, but I can raise my right hand and assure you that yesterday I was riding at Laurel Hills on my retro 20 year old Stumpjumper. I have the Strava track to prove it.

Back in the day, I would have loved to have done some hard training with my TT bike on the W&OD. There’s not too many places that are flat, relatively straight, and with minimal interruptions. However, I was mature enough to realize that the W&OD was not a good choice, especially in the middle of the afternoon on a nice day. Nowadays, on the rare times that I do ride the W&OD, I slow way down, and pass with extreme care. Better safe than sorry, and the trail is for all people.

[trailrunner]

@dplasters 177489 wrote:

Not to be that person, but if you are talking about where I think you are talking about on Rolling, the speed limit is 40mph. Which means you are not to yield to the pedestrian.

§ 46.2-924. Drivers to stop for pedestrians; installation of certain signs; penalty.
A. The driver of any vehicle on a highway shall yield the right-of-way to any pedestrian crossing such highway:

1. At any clearly marked crosswalk, whether at mid-block or at the end of any block;

2. At any regular pedestrian crossing included in the prolongation of the lateral boundary lines of the adjacent sidewalk at the end of a block;

3. At any intersection when the driver is approaching on a highway or street where the legal maximum speed does not exceed 35 miles per hour.

I said that he was in a clearly marked crosswalk. Isn’t that covered in section 1 of the law you cited?

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[trailrunner]

Did the police cite the driver?

[trailrunner]

@rcannon100 177437 wrote:

The most horn honking I have heard lately?? Directed at car drivers who yielded to pedestrians in cross walks – honking from the cars behind.

Yesterday I was driving up Rolling Road, just north of Old Keene Mill Road, about 4:30 pm. An older gentleman was standing on the corner, trying to cross Rolling Road *in the crosswalk*. After watching a police car drive by and not stop, I had the audacity to stop to let the poor man cross. The car next to me did the right thing and stopped too. For a moment I thought that I was going to get rear-ended, and then the horns started honking behind us.

That was the best thing I did all day.

[trailrunner]

Now that I’ve seen the video, the autonomous sensor should have done better. There wasn’t a lot of clutter in the scene. The fact that we only see the victim for a second is irrelevant and an artifact of the video. The vehicle was most likely using a LIDAR, which is an active system (typically in NIR or SWIR), and maybe a passive LWIR sensor (these are already commercially available on some cars with algorithms to detect humans or animals). The sensors on the Uber also probably had a wider field of regard than what we’re seeing.

As I said earlier, what might’ve confused the algorithm is that she was walking with a bike. Some of the algorithms I developed looked for certain traits in humans, such as swinging legs or certain aspect ratios (height to width ratios). Having a bike in front of the person might’ve messed that up. However, the sensor still should have detected a human-sized object in a crossing trajectory and should have stopped the vehicle. But these sensors take some time to build up a history of the scene, and if the person walked out from the bushes, and if the car was going 40-45 mph, there might not have been enough time to build an adequate history. And, although I said that there didn’t seem to be much clutter in the scene, without seeing the LIDAR cloud, or the IR image, I can’t say any of this with any certainty. She might’ve been behind a bush in the median, and it’s hard to understand what the scene might’ve looked like in LWIR, which senses heat around ambient and body temperatures.

And as I also said earlier, I’m not at all surprised something like this happened. Despite the optimistic claims being made, I think we’re a long way from completely self-driving cars. I’m not an expert in this area, but I’ve developed these kind of sensors and know what they really can and can’t do.

[trailrunner]

So what if the pedestrian was or was not in a crosswalk?

Walking at night may or may not have been an issue. A common sensor for autonomous vehicles is a LIDAR, which is an active system which will work day or night. If the vehicle was using a passive sensor, many of the commercial systems in cars use an IR sensor, which should work at night.

The part that interests me is that she was walking her bicycle. Having that in the scene along with the human might’ve confused the algorithm.

However, there are many other factors that could have led to the failure. Image processing is complex, and dynamic urban scenes are extremely complex. Humans are very good at processing scenes (although not perfect, of course). Teaching a machine to do that, and to work in every possible situation, is extremely challenging.

[trailrunner]

I have done a little work developing sensors for autonomous vehicles. I am absolutely not surprised that this happened.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[trailrunner]

They gave Fairfax County a Bronze award last year. What a joke.

[trailrunner]

The 510 had an early problem of losing rides. Garmin came out with a software update to fix this. The update was noticeable, because it would take a lot longer to save the ride (maybe 20 seconds, instead of the usual 5 seconds). I’m not a computer guy so I don’t know exactly what it did, but I imagined it throttled the data so that it could double and triple checking every byte or trackpoint or whatever as it saved it. I’ve never lost a ride with my 510, although it’s not my primary computer now.

[trailrunner]

@drevil 174783 wrote:

Agreed, that Whisperlite is kinda laughable now with all the parts you had to carry (and sometimes broke). Jetboils are so simple, work great and are really easy to use. However, mine fit weirdly in my bikepacking bag because of it’s tall cylindrical profile, so I got one of these micro stoves from Amazon. They’re insanely compact, but a little slower to boil than a Jetboil. With a different (ti) pot, it fits better in my pack and happens to be lighter to boot!

Yeah, I have one of those micro stoves too. I understand what you’re saying about the packability of the JetBoil, but I find that I still reach for my JetBoil. I like having everything in one grab-and-go unit.

Coffee along the C&O last October.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]16947[/ATTACH]

[trailrunner]

@anomad 174488 wrote:

I’ve heard great things about the JetBoil system for boiling water, they are very popular. I’ve also heard its not the best for regular cooking since its kind of hard to regulate the temperature.

JetBoils work great. I’ve used mine camping (bike, backpacking, and car), and on picnics. I’ve used mine when out in the field for work. I used it at work another time when we lost electricity. I will not be without coffee.

Compared to my old (old) MSR Whisperlite, the JetBoil was a big improvement.

[trailrunner]

@Boomer2U 173469 wrote:

So I guess that I must be past my 50th Anniversary Bike commuting somewhere I needed to go on a regular basis.

I guess I’m right about there too. I rode my bike through school. I probably started about the 2nd grade when we moved out of walking distance. That would have been about 1968.

I remember my bike around that time had a fake gas tank made out of sheet metal so that it would look like a motorcycle. What was neat about it was that there was a little lid that flipped up, and I could store things in there. Like the dead bird I found one day on the way to school. Even after a week the smell didn’t bother me too much, but for some reason it sure bothered my mom.

[trailrunner]

I’m a little old school, but I can loop something like this over and over in my head during my commute in the morning, and arrive at work very mellow.

Allman Brothers — Blue Sky

When I used to be a regular at the Tuesday-Thursday Annandale Speedworks (also known as Wakey), it was heavy metal in the car on the way there.

[trailrunner]

I also took a frame to Asco a while ago (maybe 15 years ago?). I got a simple, one-color, industrial coating that has held up very well. The price was reasonable, and they did a fine job.

[trailrunner]

Looks like the OP has been registered on the site for one year, so it would be hard to attribute an increase in spam to participating in FS or this forum.

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