cars technologies

In another train collision incident I read about - again one train was immobile and second ran into it. (not talking about USA here for this example, can't remember where it was but anyway).

In this one, the train suddenly stopped and passengers thought it must have got to the station and so they stood up, then the collision occurred which made it worse that they'd stood up (its another example of passengers standing prior to the collision).

I wonder why it stopped. Perhaps a failsafe mechanism activated? But more to the point, why then didn't the second train stop, which then ran into it. Presumably another train on the line, would stop, if it detects itself getting too close to another train which had stopped due to failsafe activating?

JP

In a third train accident situation i read about.. a train went off the tracks, and then all the carriages behind it therefore got into the accidnt as well cause they were caused to leave the tracks too.

The problem with rail is that if something goes wrong its really designed to stay on the tracks, you can't just drive the train around the problem.

I thought what if they'd mounted wheels on the train.. that is, so in the event of it dismounting from the track, wheels automatically come into action which take the weight of the carriages, allowing it to drive onward now off the tracks, while braking, and also the carriages separate automatically so they don't pull each other into worse situations, maybe they have some kind of elasticity at their ends so if their ends collide then it reduces the effect.

Actually, another one of my ideas I had (back in 2000) was to do with accident impact minimization. The thought then begins with, that since you need to minimize both external-to-car and internal-to-body momentum changes. That is, you could design a car that won't shatter or break during impact, and will just bounce off things and stop, unharmed, and you can strap yourself in to the car so you don't hit anything or undergo any collisions within the car (eg whiplast etc) but the acceleration changes would kill you even if the car could handle it and even if you were strapped in so no part of your body moves with respect to the car during the collision - since internal organs of your body still can move during acceleration.

Therefore the idea comprised segments as follows:

1) external minimalization: designed cars so on impact, maximum bounce effect and do not have it compress/break any more (as we at present have it break slowly over longest timespan during headon collisoin for example, to minimize impact forces by maximizing the time). Instead, we could design it so the car external doesn't break and design it so it bounces, with maximum energy transfer into the 'bounce' so that you now have elastic collisoins with anything it runs into. EG if it run into a wall it would bounce off, whether head on, side on, etc, maybe make the car round or give it an exterior shell buffer layer. Therefore this gets rid of external damage to car itself during collision

2) Have to design car so it can internally handle the acceleration changes inherent in the 'bounce' effect

3) Have to isolate people inside, so they do not feel effect of acceleration changes. For this one, I proposed contain the person in a cylindrical rotating enclosure. This is designed so that normally it doesn't rotate, but if there's an acceleration change too great, then it releases the lock, allowing it to translate acceleration changes into rotational energy - the idea is that, the same amount of energy change, over a great enough radius of sphere, will no longer be any noticeable acceleration change - a large increase in energy cause only a small change in velocity near the edge, if a big enough rotatable sphere. Like I got the idea from the gyroscope - you have a rotating wheel, and if you turn the wheel left (while it still rotate at same speed), the platform you are on then rotates the other way.

So the idea there is to design some kind of mechanical system which converts the energy of a significant change-of-acceleration of the car, into only a small change in velocity & acceleration actually being felt by the person. After all, is this actually possible to do? It seems to be, intuitively possible... after all, making use of some kind of mass to convert the energy to somewhere else, or something?

I don't know if that's really enough..

Maybe someone else might think up another design completely - the idea is basically how you can have collisions happen (at any speed eg set the fastest possible a car could ever do in theory, while maintain traction and driveable ? 120km/h? or 300km/h or more if apply to racing events as well?) then design the system so the cars can bounce and no acceleration effect on the people inside - if this is even possible..

Maybe the system can have an internal component that momentarily accelerate in the opposite direction to whatever change occurred (into store into a spring eg) then the spring releas ethe energy into some other direction in which it will release much slower or only small effect? Bearing in mind very small timeframes and significant accelerations talking about...

If you have something travelling forward at 60km/h, stopping it linearly is going to be a pretty great deceleration (relatively speaking). But if you turn it into a curved path while it decelerate, that would be lesser deceleration. That's where the rotational inner part idea came from.

I don't know if it a bogus idea.... maybe its just not going to have any effect on deceleration??

Ideas anyone? ...

JP

That's cool! I never knew what your job was. Neat.

The psychology is easy to understand, at least. Jumping off a train because a train coming from afar doesn't seem likely to stop, although it still has plenty of space to do so, is unpleasant, embarassing, and dangerous (you could break your leg). In fact, if a significant body of passengers had jumped off the stationary train (following a few souls less motivated by conformity, a "panic"), resulting in avoidable injuries, and the second train _had_ stopped in plenty of time, then we might focus on the identical passenger behavior receiving identical inputs as sub-optimal, irrational, and so forth.

In truth all complex, dangerous and largely unprecedented situations are fraught with potential false positives and negatives. In fact, I sometimes find myself thinking of "what-if" scenarios in daily life, which would present me with the same choice between potentially embarassing and seemingly irrational flight in the case of a false positive, and standing in the face of oncoming danger: a person who continually jumps off stationary trains in the face of potential but largely unrealized collisions accrues negative consequences.

Ohmygod ... that sounds frighteningly plausible. You mean the system tracked only active trains, but not inactivated trains which became immobile hazards? Tsk, tsk, tsk. It presumably had no capability to deal with sleeping cows either: other than a fence.

The cute old "cow-catchers" must have made a major amount of messy road kill, and a boon for coyotes.

Is it possible this visual recognition of obstacles was the function of the pinocle playing train operator? It's hard to maintain alertness in jobs where 99.99% of the time alertness is useless overhead, but it can be done: failure to do so amounts to a management failure ... whatever the invdividual culpability of the employee ... because management is supposed to have the experience to know that

0.01% will eventually occur with certainty, and devise drill systems to raise the rate of effective positives.

No system is completely failsafe ... you can only multiply redundancy to the point of diminishing returns, the criteria for which will always be second guessed by bureaucrats, law makers, and tort lawyers.

Any major technology shift also faces an unfairly skewed awareness of its fatalities -- 30,000 killed by people? No problem. God help us when the first ten are killed by computer failure.

Basically he says the question is whether it worthwhile of budget to equip trains with ability to sense obstacles in front/ behind them (diminishing returns by creating more and more new failsafe mechanisms), perhaps cheaper to rely on observer (train driver) in train to see them. Personally I wonder if he'd notice, if the rate is one such accident occurred in a drivers entire career. Like waiting for the ball to fall into the water (electromagnet deactivates when battery runs out, therefore unknown by participants when exactly this happens) during a TV series (part of a challenge), when it happened they weren't really expecting it or fully ready for it (or even know exactly what to do in their case).

He says that people didn't jump off the train before the collision that injured many of them, because you'd be embarrassed if it had actually stopped, and paranoid if you'd actually jumped every time you saw a train coming toward your stationary train car.

He says that even if technology create automated cars (driven by computer), that save 29,990 lives ... those 10 lives that are killed by computer failure will make the news - IE that is the problem for new technology is assurity of improvement.

Actually personally though, I think its just getting the people with money to sell it, make it, and market it to the public, after that people will follow. After all if they make all new cars come with a new facility then people just accept it and choose whether to enable it or not. If you put out enough coercian via media advertising (controlling the media - various forms) etc, people will follow anything pretty much... they'd probably even launch themself into space and all get killed, if someone told us we had to do it cause the earth was going to self destruct and the government funded a 'launch everyone into space' project to save us, because some scientists or media controllers got a misunderstanding.... like a significant size astroid that heads toward us for years, but changes path just at the last moment and actually misses us. Lucky for those that didn't know what was going on and stayed behind. You get the point anyway... with enough power (some kind of measure of the ability to control/ influence everyone), any changes can happen.

Actually I think it a bit simpler than that though. Fully automated cars are possible - therefore they WILL happen. Just a question of when.

JP