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Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Photography & Images

Taking & making images.

Sharing the Road on Raymond Avenue: Part 3

This truck driver gave us as much room as he possibly could, given the cramped conditions on Raymond Avenue:

Raymond Ave – 2015-07-17 – Truck Clearance 1

Notice the street lamp in view directly above the cab? Keep that in mind.

In order to give us that much clearance, he had to put the left wheels up on the median:

Raymond Ave – 2015-07-17 – Truck Clearance 2

That’s exactly what the NYSDOT engineer who designed Raymond Avenue explained to me drivers should do. Driving on the median is the intent of the Raymond Avenue layout.

FWIW, the “brick paver” median surface is actually stamped asphalt (or some thermoplastic material) painted brick red. It has marginal durability; the same material in the rotary islands began disintegrating after a few months, has accumulated many non-textured patches, and was obviously not intended to support routine travel.

After that truck passed, the FedEx driver also gave us plenty of clearance, also with left wheels on the median:

Raymond Ave – 2015-07-17 – Truck Clearance 3

Notice the minimal clearance between that lamp post and the protruding driver-side mirror? You’re supposed to drive on the median to avoid cyclists, while simultaneously not colliding with a zero-clearance black lamp post.

Those lamp posts replaced the original bollards bracketing the crosswalk (just ahead of Mary in the first picture). Those bollards stood directly in the pseudo-brick area on both sides of the travel lane, with zero clearance from the inclined curb and roughly in line with those truck headlights: anyone driving up on the median at the crossing to avoid a cyclist would mow down a nonreflective black bollard.

And, indeed, mowed down they were.

A few years ago, NYSDOT removed the bollards from the “pedestrian refuges” (that’s their term for the crosswalk median area) and repositioned the remainder in the center of the median, presumably to protect them from drivers.

Share the road, that we do…

2015-08-04
Verifying Yet Another Sony 64 GB MicroSD Card
The replacement for the second failed Sony SR-64UY MicroSD card arrived:

Sony SR-64UX 64 GB MicroSDXC card

The previous cards were made in Korea, but this one came from Taiwan with a different serial number format:

Sony SR-64UX 64 GB MicroSDXC card – back

The tiny letters on the front identify it as an SR-64UX, but I haven’t been able to find any definitive Sony source describing the various cards; their catalog page listing cards for digital still cameras may be as good as it gets. This one seems to have a higher read speed, for whatever little good that may do.

It stored and regurgitated the usual deluge of video files with no problem, which is only to be expected. This time around, I checked the MD5 sums, rather than unleashing diff on the huge files:
```
cd /media/ed/9C33-6BBD/
for f in * ; do find /mnt/video/ -name $f | xargs md5sum $f ; done
11e31c9ba3befbef6dd3630bb68064d6 MAH00539.MP4
11e31c9ba3befbef6dd3630bb68064d6 /mnt/video/2015-07-05/MAH00539.MP4
... snippage ...
```
It now sits in the fancy plastic display case that the HDR-AS30V camera came in until the previous replacement card fails.
2015-08-02
Traffic Signal Timing: Burnett Blvd. at Rt 55

Adapted from an email to NYSDOT (hvtmc@dot.state.ny.us):

The minimum green and yellow times on the signals from Burnett Blvd to Rt 55 are too short for bicycle traffic making a left turn across six traffic lanes.

The pictures show key points from our ride on 2015-07-10, returning from the Balloon Festival in Poughkeepsie. We took the DCRT around Poughkeepsie, went through Arlington to Rt 376 at Collegeview, then took Rt 376 Red Oaks Mill.

The image sequence numbers identify frames extracted from video files. The front camera (a Sony HDR-AS30V) runs at 60 fps and the rear camera (a Cycliq Fly6) at 30 fps, so you can directly calculate the time between frames. The Fly6 timestamp is one hour ahead, for reasons I don’t quite understand.

The red signals are turning off and the greens haven’t lit up yet:

Burnett at Rt 55 Signal – Front 0196

One second later, the car and our bikes are starting to roll:

Burnett at Rt 55 Signal – Front 0260

Given the number of drivers blowing through red signals at full speed, devoting one second to watching for oncoming traffic seems prudent.

The yellow signals begin turning on seven seconds after the green:

Burnett at Rt 55 Signal – Front 0633

The car has reached the pedestrian ladder across Rt 55, but we’re still crossing the westbound lanes of traffic. Note that I’m lined up with the lane closest to our starting point on Burnett: this is a big intersection. We may not be the fastest riders on the road, but we’re not the slowest, either.

We’ve reached the far side of the intersection just under 16 seconds from the green:

Burnett at Rt 55 Signal – Front 1142

However, the opposing signals turned green while we’re still crossing the eastbound lanes of Rt 55, 15 seconds after the Burnett Blvd signals went green:

Burnett at Rt 55 Signal – Rear 0408

About 2.7 seconds later, cars have been accelerating across the intersection toward us as we reach the pedestrian ladder:

Burnett at Rt 55 Signal – Rear 0490

They started rolling immediately after their signal went green; waiting a second isn’t a universal practice.

Setting the minimum Burnett green to 12 seconds, the minimum yellow to 10 seconds, and the minimum delay from Burnett green to Rt 55 green to 30 seconds would help cyclists (just barely) reach the far side of the intersection before opposing traffic starts rolling.

As a bonus, adjusting the sensor amplifiers on Burnett to respond to bicycles and marking the coil locations on the pavement in both lanes would help us through the intersection during low-traffic-volume times, as our bikes seem unable to trip the signals.

2015-07-24
On the Cutting Edge of Metal Recycling

A semitrailer load of scrap metal pulled into an I-90 rest stop just after we arrived:

Metal scrap trailer – Cutting edge

Apparently, they dump the scrap into the trailer from a great height and, sometimes, a bar can gash the aluminum side wall. That slice obviously predates the current load, but you can see how it happened: dump a load atop a bar leaning against the side and you get a giant metal shear.

The trailer also had several puncture wounds:

Metal scrap trailer – Puncture wounds

I didn’t notice the circular feature at the bottom center until I looked at the picture, but it certainly reminded me of a bullet hole in glass plate. Close inspection of the original image suggests it’s a welded stress relief border around a drilled hole, perhaps with a boss on the inside of the trailer:

Metal scrap trailer – Welded hole

Ya never know what you’ll find out on the road…

2015-07-18
ImageMagick: Compressing to a Fixed File Size
Verily, ImageMagick can do nearly anything you want to an image, as long as you know how to ask for it:
```
for f in *png ; do convert $f -density 300 -define jpeg:extent=200KB ${f%%.*}.jpg ; done
```
That converts a directory full of VLC’s video snapshot images from PNG format, which require nigh onto 4 MB each, into correspondingly named JPG files under 200 kB. The image quality may not be the greatest, but it’s good enough to document road hazards in emails.

Rt 376 2015-07-06 – Walker to Maloney – 3

The density option overrides VLC’s default 72 dpi, which doesn’t matter until a program attempts to show the image at “actual size”.

I didn’t realize that the define option existed, but it seems to be how you jam specific controls into the various image coders & decoders. Some of the “artifacts”, well, I can’t even pronounce…

VLC’s snapshot file names look like vlcsnap-2015-07-06-12h10m27s10.png, so bulk renaming and resequencing will be in order.
2015-07-17
Monthly Image: Sunset Over Lake Erie

We spent a pleasant evening hour walking & sitting on the town beach in North East PA on our way back from Detroit:

Sunset over Lake Erie – North East PA

The entire area smells strongly of the grapes that grow well in the hilly terrain south of Lake Erie. A local expert said that Welch’s (a major local employer) moved its CHQ to Concord MA to put a better hometown name on the company’s letterhead; being based in North East evidently didn’t have the same ring.

2015-07-15
Action Cameras: Night Performance

The Sony HDR-AS30V camera takes surprisingly good pictures in low light conditions, at least if you’re not too fussy about details like license plates…

At dusk, on our way to the City of Poughkeepsie’s Independence Day fireworks show:

Night Ride 2015-07-04 – AS30V – 0

Returning in full dark:

Night Ride 2015-07-04 – AS30V – 1

A light fog set in as we got out of the city:

Night Ride 2015-07-04 – AS30V – 2

The Cycliq Fly6 faces a major challenge from in-its-face headlights, even with some background streetlighting:

Night Ride 2015-07-04 – Fly6 – 1

In full dark, it’s enough for mood-setting:

Night Ride 2015-07-04 – Fly6 – 2

That ride marks the annual exception to our general Don’t Bike After Dark rule. We set our blinky taillights to the legally required steady mode, although I think a low-power blink mode would be more conspicuous. Perhaps an occulting light (constant bright with dim pulses) would be better, but I’m not sure that’s legal.

Yeah, checkitout: I’d be occulting in the dark on my ‘bent! Them Wiccans ain’t got nothing on me…

We have reflective tires, tape along the inside of the wheels, retroreflective packs, brilliant LED taillights, mediocre LED headlights (admittedly behind scuffed fairings), and look like UFOs in the dark.

A roadie on a fancy bike, riding dark without lights and reflectors, passed us. Watching him dodge a car that entered an intersection without seeing him once again demonstrated that cyclists are, in general, their own worst enemy.

2015-07-14