I once parked my car on a street with no parking restriction signs anywhere. I went back to the car to get something a few hours later and they were placing signs down the street. As soon as a sign was placed, they would ticket the cars nearby. I moved my car just in time.
With this tech, they could do this at will. Probably correlated with whenever the people running the city want more money.
Give it 6 months and someone will have modified these signs. Probably in a crude, old Nokia phone cabled to the back of the sign, method.
Hopefully it will be seen as a useful signpost (no pun intended) for the ongoing challenge of distributing digital info to an, on average, trusting public.
Don't be surprised if you see some unlimited parking in Sydney next April 1st.
Very uninformed speculation. Visionect's previous products came with a water-tight, tamper-proof enclosure & a number of software based security measures, because one of their tablets interfaced with Point of Sale systems.
This is a bit more complex than a regular micro-controlled LCD. There are a number of ways you can drive an e-ink display. Then there are a number of ways you can choose to control such a display remotely. Last but not least, a sizeable chunk of the stack powering these displays is proprietary technology, and has been in development for more than 3 years.
Almost everything is hackable when you have physical access to the system. That's why such systems should detect and report tampering. Something regular traffic signs never did in the first place.
And why is "proprietary technology" a good thing? Limited visibility into the code really doesn't improve anything. Ask Chrysler about their Jeeps being hacked, how much that proprietary thing helped.
And "more than three years". Oooh. OpenSSL was in development for what, 16 years, and heartbleed happened anyways.
I have no doubt it's a little bit harder than a few weeks with a USB cable and a traffic sign, but assuming they will not be tampered with at some point is not born out by any facts we know about software.
I know a guy who fixed a long-standing traffic congestion problem in his city by replacing some complicated parking signs on a busy thoroughfare with simple, MUTCD-compliant "no parking any time" signs (which are cheaply available from a variety of manufacturers and can easily be ordered online). They've been up for ages, nobody has touched them, and it's not clear whether the city doesn't mind or simply hasn't noticed.
happened to my friend as well. he parked his bike in the evening on the properly marked parking spot. next morning new signs were in place and his bike was towed. he had to pay a fine to get his bike back and all reasoning was denied
The big downside is when you park you don't just need to know the conditions when you park, you need to know the conditions for the entire length of your intended stay. You also need confidence that the signs will remain unchanging throughout your stay because if the signs update and you get a ticket the burden of proof is going to fall on you to prove your innocence.
This concern is only relevant if you think that the only thing preventing the regulators from changing the signs is the technological hassle of doing it. If you rather believe than the signs change based on the need to accommodate a film crew for a few days like in LA, the this is a neutral change.
In any case, analog signs are changes from time to time anyway, so the objection is not new in principle. The simplest solution is then use whatever method was used previously to resolve this.
I work at Visionect and have helped develop the eink platform for these signs. They can be changed with whichever frequency is required, more frequently or less so (once a day etc). And while the technology is one thing, as mentioned before, good design is the one that can eliminate any confusion that people may have on how long the restrictions may last. There's more info on our website if you're interested: http://v.visionect.com/sydney_epaper_road_signs
Don't the people buying and operating the signs have a substantial financial incentive to create confusion? I'm just saying, don't expect people to sabotage their own paychecks.
More likely go to park and find the sign is vandalised and you have no idea of the restrictions in place.
Talking about bad signs I once got a fine for parking on a road near the Randwick Racecourse (this is next to UNSW). It was fine to park there expect on race days. You would think this would be pretty easy to work this out as the race course was visible from the road and when they were running races there were horses and people everywhere. If only it was so simple - apparently race days could be race days at other race tracks meaning a race happening somewhere else meant you got a fine. How a normal person was supposed to know this is beyond me.
More mechanical versions of this sort of sign have been around for quite some time without huge abuse.
There are streets around here that vary between pedestrian only, limited traffic (i.e. deliveries to serve local shops), and open access but one way, depending on the time of day. They are gated by signs with three faces, the right one is rotated into view at the appropriate times.
This is just an e-ink version of such signs, which achieves the same aim and will be more flexible as they are presumably easier to update if/when the rules change and aren't limited in the number of display options as a mechanical display is.
My concern would be that these new displays might be harder to read depending on lighting conditions.
Even in daylight, the screens have shitty contrast. Look at the photo. All the real street signs are high contrast and clearly visible. In the second photo, the sign is terrible to read - you wouldn't be able to read it well as you drive past. You'd actually have to pull in.
It's also redundant in that photo - a Clearway sign next to a No Stopping sign?
It doesn't seem like it would bode well for a city to be purposefully and maliciously scamming the residents through parking fines. The current method of obfuscation and confusion with legal deniability would probably work better legally. It would be pretty easy to prove in court that the signs were changing at incorrect times also.
> It doesn't seem like it would bode well for a city to be purposefully and maliciously scamming the residents through parking fines.
You haven't spent much time in San Francisco, have you? The parking violation system is corrupt, mobbed up, malicious, and I'm amazed that there hasn't been an axe-handles and pitchforks style fix to it.
It doesn't need any smart features. Just a photo of the sign's state when you park. Then if you get a ticket that photo should be enough to appeal the ticket.
Now imagine a database of photos of each sign, taken in various states at various times of day, and add a little Photoshop or other image-editing program of choice... this is too exploitable, both by those looking for free parking and those wanting to extract more parking tickets.
A photo of rotated or covered or gratified sign is already enough to appeal a parking ticket - but people don't generally do it unless it is real because... This would be fraud. Get caught and you go directly to jail (unless your really rich - in which case I guess you'll get off) for quite a long time. Like many things it is technically possible but legally a bad idea to actually do it.
The company that provided these (Visionect) also sells affordable e-ink developer kits [1]. The best part is that you can build apps in plain HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
Disclosure: I worked with Visionect a few years ago to develop an e-ink restaurant menu.
Got me excited there for a minute until I checked the price. I can't help but think this is way over-priced. The 6" DIY kit from Visionect is ~$600.
The latest 6" Kindle with WiFi is ~$80 (on Prime Day it was going for ~$50). Given that it has WiFi and there are some Jailbreaks for Kindle you could get a Kindle to do this same thing. If you want better contrast you could upgrade to the Kindle Paperwhite for $120. That's anywhere from 8% to 20% of the cost of the Visionect system.
EDIT: Turns out the Kindle can do quite a bit including running a web server, web browser, SSH and much more so this should be easily doable.
I don't really see the equivalence. The dev kit may be overpriced, but the price of a kindle isn't really a good indicator, to me. They seem like very different products.
How long do you think a kindle would last out in the elements? What is the battery like? What is the I/O like? Security (physical and software)? Is the screen contrast similar? SDK support? Customizability? 60601 ? All of these things are potentially expensive to provide.
Anyway, it may not be the right dev kit for your applications, but the fact that they share a display technology is a tiny piece of the puzzle. As you note, for you, the kindle might do a lot more for less cost (in which case, why not just use one?)
In my experience, looking at mass produced consumer electronics is a pretty terrible way to spitball the cost of anything that isn't mass produced consumer electronics.
The DIY kit cost is sort of irrelevant if you're making a product. It's the large quantity cost that sits at the top of the BOM.
It's very common for these companies to sell dev kits at high cost because the volume is tiny and the overhead of filling the order for them is large. This is nothing new.
You do know that the Kindle is subsidized by book sales, right? That and the fact that Amazon has both economies of scale and a zero-profit/market-domination strategy.
The Visionect kit is cheaper, more capable and better supported than comparable dev kits.
The Kindle might be subsidized in a general sense, but Amazon does not sell the devices at a loss. The base hardware cost is roughly equal to the selling price.[0] I would expect something similar from a barebones developer kit.
Off-topic: how did the e-ink menu concept turn out?
I feel that a lot restaurants that change menus frequently pride themselves on printing new menus every day. When you get the menu, it seems to reinforce the idea that everything - the menu, the ingredients, etc. - is fresh. Not sure that holding an e-ink reader that's been handled thousands of times by others would give the same feeling, but maybe I'm wrong?
The company seems to have pivoted to a more lucrative business model though (Slovenian population is 2MM, with GDP per capita somewhere around 17000 EUR).
Pipe dream: municipalities make parking permission data available over an API, app makers create an app that shows you the current rules for your location, you can figure out the situation at the push of a button and the data provided is legally binding.
Despite conspiracy theories its more likely that the aim is to avoid congestion at peak times, and control demand for parking, but hey, its a government policy, so has to be evil by default. Everyone should just be able to do whatever they like, and let the free market economy ensure only the rich live well.
Making such information is not going to affect any of the purported reasons for having parking restrictions it will only reduce the risk that someone will park somewhere by accident. If anything making the parking restrictions clearer and more accessible can only reduce the level of congestion since people won’t be parking somewhere they should not by accident. The only thing affected would be revenue.
From what I can see, nothing specifically states that the signs are intended to be changed extremely frequently, nor that the information displayed is strictly for right now.
With good design and usage, issues like not knowing if you will be able to park in the signposted area in two hours time become less likely. The ability to change the signs frequently doesn't mean that they will. The examples shown tended to be things like
* No parking during Sunday markets
* No parking from 3pm - 11pm on a special event day
Obviously these could be abused, or used poorly, but I wouldn't say that they are bad because of that fact.
Yeah, in either case, I'm still confused. The e-ink one shows examples that are confusing. The one linked to here in the comments shows a designers attempt at packing all that information in.
The reality is, I want to know one thing: How long can I park here.
Maybe the length of time is 0 (No parking). You show: No Parking.
Maybe it's for the next 4 hours: Parking 4 Hours Remaining. Or maybe you put the time when it ends: Parking until 6 AM.
Maybe it's only for people with tag 13-A: Parking 13-A Only.
Either you can park someplace, or you can't. You can have the complete rules if people want to plan ahead, but they shouldn't be what people need to read while driving around trying to find a parking spot.
I seriously don't understand why such complicated parking rules are needed to begin with? I can understand a single (e.g. 9-5) set of times for Monday through Friday and a separate one for the weekend, but such more complex ones as I see it serve no real purpose other than ticketing people who have trouble interpreting the signs.
Because curb space in an urban environment is a very limited resource and the city government determines how the competing interests are going to share it.
One set of signs I pass rather often in Seattle looks (and probably is) complicated, but the reasoning behind it makes some sense. It is against a yellow-painted curb and says:
- No parking 6a-9a / 3p-7p except Sat/Sun/Hol
- 30-minute loading only 9a-3p / 7p-10p except Sat/Sun/Hol
- 3-minute loading only 9a-11a Sun
- <----- No parking
Why? The adjoining property is a large church that sits on what is now a major arterial route near businesses. In order, the restrictions allow for commute hours traffic in that lane, reserve a zone for deliveries during the rest of the hours in a weekday, reserve a zone for parishioners to get out at the door of the church, and foreclose parking that is too close to the corner and a fire hydrant. Parking is, implicitly, allowed all day on Saturday when commute hours aren't in effect, some of the businesses are closed and the remainder are receiving fewer/no deliveries, and the church isn't in session.
By the looks of the photos, none of the street signs are normal parking zone signs, but rather special event signage.
Those are only used for special events and don't change very often. This is a good example for their use. I agree with what others have said about the risks and concerns if this were to be used for ALL parking signs.
When I go driving on alpine roads, I frequently see 'warning ice' or 'warning deep snow' signs, which are quite amusing in summer.
I've often thought that printing the signs using liquid crystal technology would be useful, so ice warnings would only be visible when the temperature was at least close to 0C
During week days I often pay attention to signs while I am walking/driving through to keep in mind if I will be able to park there on Saturday or Sunday. With these new signs - that would be impossible.
You also wouldn't know if you can park after the sign changes in general. If it says you can park from 3 to 11PM, what do you do if you arrive at 10:30 and you want to know what happens at 11? With a sign that shows all the requirements, it might say that parking costs money from 3-11 and after that it's free, or it might say that you can't park at all after 11. With these signs, you don't know until 11.
Public signage typically has high visual contrast, doesn't it? The dynamic, somewhat critical information these are displaying is tragically muddy and hard to resolve, even from some of these photos here.
A shame. Before seeing the end-result, I thought it was a cracking-good idea.
I'm not really seeing your perspective, it seems clear to me. I'll reserve final judgement for if I ever see them in person, but from the three images in the article I saw no problems.
In that second photo, the e-ink contrast fails web accessibility standards. Background is #889294, darkest foreground I found was #5e6669 (most foreground was not this dark)
Or easier: compare to the signs around it. It's much less readable. Traffic signs aren't like Funky Website Of The Month. It's not okay for traffic signs to just ignore inconvenient users - so even if they were skirting some visibility standards, it wouldn't be good enough. They need to be really clear, not barely passable (and this sign isn't even that).
And this photo is reasonably lit, without overcast conditions, mist, or rain. People often forget to include those when discussing road-related things like speed limits or signage.
Traffic signs? Sure. But what was shown in the article was a replacement for confusing parking signs which would be much less critical for passing cars to immediately be able to discern.
I really think that regardless of how much you need to squint to make out a parking sign it would still be better than some of those monstrosities that have about 20 exceptions depending on the time of day.
The signs in the article photos will do nothing to reduce confusion around parking signs. They're all special-purpose Clearway signs. The intent of the sign is not in the e-ink part; that bit only gives you some timing information. As a result, it has no bearing on the problem of locations with multiple parking rules - it is still 'just another rule'.
Have a look at their sample photos. Two of the photos have the sign by themselves. This clears up what kind of confusion? How are they better then a normal sign in this location? The remaining photo has two other signs, which work together fine with a non-e-ink version of the e-ink sign. Hardly a monstrosity.
The only advantage the photographed sign really has is that the council can easily change the details on it between different roadwork events, without having to glue a new set of numbers on it.
After seeing all those enthusiatic comments, I was very disappointed when I saw what this is actually about.
I was expecting something like changing marks on the street, maybe even auto-rearranging parking lot marks. That's what I imagined "E-Ink" / "electronic ink" to be. However, it's just a display within a sign.
Not sure about other cities, but at Berlin's highways, we have this for years. It is used to adjust speed limits to traffic, avoiding or dewarping traffic jams. It is also used to block lanes as needed, e.g. during the time tunnels are cleaned, without having to put up signs and moving them with the workers while cleaning.
What is so spectacular about using same old idea for parking signs?
You are referring to high-intensity LED lights. E-ink does not shine, therefore it requires significantly less power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Ink
I once parked my car on a street with no parking restriction signs anywhere. I went back to the car to get something a few hours later and they were placing signs down the street. As soon as a sign was placed, they would ticket the cars nearby. I moved my car just in time.
With this tech, they could do this at will. Probably correlated with whenever the people running the city want more money.