Thought of the Day - Traffic Management Idea

Last week i was sitting waiting in a traffic jam caused by road works and it occurred to me that traffic management is not run in the most efficient way.

If you consider the bottleneck in the process to be the physical bottleneck in the road and the number of vehicles passing as throughput, then it is clear that the bottleneck is grossly underutilised. As the traffic is running in opposite directions, it is clear that the bottleneck can never be fully exploited as you must wait for the last car in one direction before you can move in the opposite direction. However i think there are still significant improvements that could be made.

Firstly as soon as the last car clears the obstruction in one direction the next car should be moving in the opposite direction. Secondly the speed of the cars should be maximized past the obstruction to increase throughput. Finally the time taken for the cars to move off when the light goes green should be minimised.


So what might my traffic management system look like? I would set the lights back from the obstruction by the same length as the obstruction and have the lights change in the reverse direction based on when the last car leaves in the forward direction. This would allow the cars moving in the reverse direction to move off and get up to speed before the obstruction maximising throughput and minimising wasted time. This eliminates the lag in the system for the cars to move off, it also maximises speed through the obstruction meaning the bottleneck is maximally exploited.

There are 3 issues i can see with this system:
The first is if you get a boy racer at the start of the second set of traffic who screams past the lights and then has to jam on the brakes to avoid the oncoming traffic. This would disrupt the traffic behind and impair the throughput.
The second is if you had a very slow vehicle (crane, lorry or little old lady) they would act as a further bottleneck that would reduce the throughput. Unfortunately almost every traffic management system would retain this problem and by giving the vehicle time to accelerate before the obstruction the problem is minimised.
The final problem is that you cannot always see the full length of the obstruction, in this instance if there was a very slow vehicle passing the obstruction the two traffic flows could meet in the middle and come to a stalemate causing chaos. Unfortunately it is not possible to have good visibility on all roadworks so this may limit the locations where this system could be applied. It would also be possible to have an 'emergency stop' sign just prior to the obstruction to prevent this from happening if all of the traffic had not cleared the obstruction.

All of the above issues could be somewhat mitigated through public eduction either via signs or media sources and completely removed if you introduced two convoy vehicles to pace and control the traffic. While the latter option would greatly increase the cost of traffic management it could be used in high profile or high volume situations where throughput was critical.


While i'm sure every motorist would love spending less time in traffic jams and technically they are the end customer. In reality they don't control the cheque books and the cost of the additional equipment might discourage companies from using it. After all the because the motorists aren't paying, best case is that the company gets less complaints. But as with the Heroes Vs Planners debate they are unlikely to get positive feedback, there will still be a delay and the motorist won't know how bad the delay could have been if the system was not used.

Thought of the Day - UK Hotel Wifi

I'm staying at the Travel Inn (not Lodge) at Manchester Airport and it is damn near perfect; clean room, minimalist, flat screen TV, comfy bed, quiet and bliss of bliss it even has aircon.

But the one thing that kills it all is the woefully slow wifi ... it can't even save this blog post as i go along and my Tada Lists (the simplest web pages known to man) are taking >10 minutes to open. What i want to know is how on earth can this be the case? If it was free (as is the case in most of north america) i could live with it but i'm paying £10 a day for the privilege, if i was charged this rate at home i'd have a dedicated fibre line right to my flat. I'm not even going to be able to use it for the whole 24 hours; arrive 4pm leave 7am and 8 hours sleep inbetween leaves a maximum of 7 hours surfing. Worse still i'm not even doing heavy web browsing (downloading attachments or uploading anything), i'm loading some text based web pages and it is taking forever.

To anyone who runs a hotel in the UK; either stop gouging your customers for the slowest internet connection since 33.6kbps dial-up or provide a decent service for the exorbitant fee you charge.

Thought of the Day - Hacking

I love the spirit of hacking (the traditional rather than computer definition of the word), taking something and making it fit your needs. Alas i there are limitations to my hacking ability: computers, electronics, mechanical things; sure, more traditional craft things; not so much.

I bought a pair of Vibram Five Fingers shoes and while they are very comfortable i can't really use them everywhere without socks. Normal socks won't stretch and separate enough around my toes, so i thought i could hack them (literally) into shape. Alas my sewing skills are not quite up to par, after an hour i had neatly sewed lines in so i could cut toe sized slots in the socks. While i did manage to get 5 pockets, unfortunately only 3 of them were large enough to accommodate my toes ... Doh!

The moral of the story is while £60 seems a lot for socks, the time and effort (and socks) i would have wasted perfecting this hack would be better spent on other things. Fortunately Injinji make some lovely high performance socks that fit my needs perfectly, so time to bite the financial bullet.

Book Notes - The 4-Hour Work Week

The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris [2007]

Summary:
Alas not many notes from this book, it is just so different from anything I’ve ever read before I’m not quite sure what to write down. I suspect that some reflection and re-reading will be required before I have full notes.

I kind of feel like I’m being exploited by the book, that the lifestyle it espouses requires you to exploit other people (in this case me), the author highlights an adware pioneer as someone to aspire to after all. But at the same time there is definitely some gold in there and it is thought provoking and eminently quotable.

I think the concepts in this book could help you run any business. While a more morally acceptable product would not be as profitable or easy as the products the author suggests, the methods are applicable.

With all of the above said I think Timothy Ferris is very astute, he is giving away his secrets because he knows people will pay good money for the dream it sells but very few have the courage and determination to see it through. For other examples see Toyota or Eli Goldratt.

Notes:
Page 4: People don’t want to be millionaires, they want the millionaire lifestyle.
Page 77: Three times a day (at set times ask yourself; “Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?”
Page 101: The author suggests batching things (E-mail, phone calls, bills payments), it sounds rather un-lean to me, maybe an alternative self-help book would be how to lean your life. It is a bit strange because a lot of the other things in the book sound very like Theory of Constraints and Lean ...
Page 120: By outsourcing things to other people you will be surprised how many tasks don’t need done if you have to pay for them directly.
Page 192: Offer limited options, while you can charge heftier premiums for customisation it can create more problems than it is worth. Firstly options attract pedantic picky people who are more likely to complain if it is not exactly what they want. Secondly too many options can make customers more indecisive and hence less likely to buy, they worry about the benefits of one product over another etc.
Page 193: Try to avoid high maintenance low profit customers, they will waste the majority of your time and provide the lowest income.

Quotes:
Page 13: “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field” – Niels Bohr
Page 46: “What we fear doing most is normally what we most need to do.”
Page 74: “Parkinson’s law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.”
Page 168: “To get an accurate indicator of commercial validity, don’t ask people if they would buy, ask them to buy.”
Page 220: All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it is impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Develop strength to do bold things not the strength to suffer.” – Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Thought of the Day - Passport

Well i need to renew my passport and realised that my current one (10 years old in June) is depressingly empty.

4 stamps for Canada, 2 green bits of cardboard from America and one rather spiffy whole page sticker for Russia. Ok the last one is rather cool and i have been places in Europe, but clearly i haven't done anything interesting enough or i would have more stamps.

Well hopefully with the next passport; I won't spend more than half of the time in abject poverty as a student (though admittedly that didn't stop some people traveling), I will make some money to enable me to holiday in interesting places and maybe be able to travel interesting places for work.

I'm sure some old business tycoon said one of his rules was; "to always replace a passport before it expired because there was no room left in it", clearly he did all of his traveling before EU countries stopped stamping you passport!

Thought of the Day - Travel Tip \ Overtime Tip

Learning 1 courtesy of Anura:

You should keep a copy of the front and back of all the credit cards and things in your wallet so if it gets stolen you have all the important info.

Learning 2:
If you are going to work at the weekend spread the work out over 2 days instead of having 10 hours in one day.