Satnav launches are like buses: none for ages then three arrive at once Satellite navigation satellites turn out to be a lot like buses: there's none for ages, then three come along all at once. The first of the three launched on Wednesday to join the US Global Posititioning System constellation. The new bird is a Boeing-built GPS IIF, the ninth of its type and one of 12 in a fleet of satellites …
It occurs to me that, for busses at least, it might be more efficient to have two come along at once, and hope that they only have to stop at every other stop, then come along twice as often but stop at every stop. This only works where busses are every ten minutes or so, though, rather than every 30 minutes / an hour.
"For reasons I don't understand, Chicago Transit Authority gave up on skip-stop scheduling."
Simple. In heavy traffic in the key areas, busses can't skip because of narrow streets. In addition passengers kick up merry hell if they can't get off where they want.
I do no understand the downvotes, for once ... ;-)
Then again, I grew up near a town where the bus service is a state service and free, as in beer. The service was pretty good at the time ... and best of all, it was/is free. To be fair, the town has a very big industrial area with quite a few very big factories - so corporate taxes actually paid for the service.
Where I live now (not at all the same area, in the same country, though) they have got a private company because Brussels thinks Maggy's idea was really great - I doubt the guyz who think that ever had the "joy" of trying to catch a bus in the UK. Now, over here buses simply fail to show up or are hopelessly late because of traffic congestion ... congestion that was caused by a substantial change to the bus service. They ditched many routes that were considered "not profitable enough" and re-routed many others (to maximize profits) causing the locals to grab their cars instead, causing more delays on the more "profitable" routes - of course, the company made big losses ... the council had to foot the bill ...
I have a bike with a baby-seat.
Hopefully all the GPS receiver manufacturers will update their software so we can receive all four navigation systems.
We should remember, the Euro Galileo system only operates with the condescension of the USA who have stated that 'they will knock them out of the sky' if they are not switched off/encrypted when the US decides that it should be so.
So go tug your forelocks.
Hey if the Chinese or Russians decide one day they don't appreciate these systems they'll knock them all down. Difficult to do without sabotaging your own space kit though. The USA, like everybody else, would have to think hard about that point before they start pressing buttons.
Pretty much every major smartphone supports GPS and GLONASS nowadays.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smartphones_supporting_GLONASS_navigation
Galileo isn't yet properly ready for deployment, nor is IRNSS.
As such, it doesn't matter because if both American and Russian systems are out, chances are the others are down too.
The purpose of Galileo was to facilitate european road user charging. A whole lot of technology is on its way into cars that is designed to sting drivers at every opportunity. Link Galileo with Ecall and you already have enough tech to monitor, track and charge every individual that uses a car; well everybody that cannot disable it anyway :)
To use a car, you have to do this thing where you go into a public area and follow public roads where there is almost no restriction on the amount of cameras there can be or what can be recorded.
To use a car in Europe, you can either a) avoid all motorways or b) you have to pull into a toll every exit / motorway change and pay a toll (sometimes directly, sometimes by taking a card and paying at the other end, or sometimes by having to have a particular electronic tag).
To use road charging via satellite, you'd have to retrofit every single vehicle with an untamperable black box that ties into the location system, the telecoms system (GPS etc. DO NOT talk upwards!), and have some form of readable unique ID. That's quite expensive, even as a mandated item in new cars, and would take DECADES to deploy. It would also have to be Europe-wide, presumably. Nobody's going to sneak that into a parliamentary bill as a side-item. (And, no doubt, if they did the penalty for disabling it would be harsher than any charge they could put on you for using it). Nobody is going to launch an entire satellite system at the cost of billions on the basis of recouping their money on a system which will likely cause all kinds of dissent once it's mandated in cars, even if other countries accept it quite happily. That's NOT what Galileo is for.
To be useful for road user charging, Galileo would have to be more efficient than the road-toll system, more accurate, cheaper and actually do it. In fact, Galileo is merely something like an order of magnitude more accurate than GPS, which is already more than accurate enough for road charging. There's nothing stopping GPS being used for road charging TODAY. But we don't have a sniff in that direction because it's political suicide (watch the news over the years, listen out for hints like this, see how many are probed by the government to gauge public reaction and then never mentioned again - e.g. 80mph on motorways - NOBODY wanted it, which annoys me greatly as everyone then whines about speed camera deployment etc.).
My European friends are already shocked that ALL the tolls in the UK are not only optional, but also quite tricky to find if you don't know the UK and easy to avoid if you want to. Seriously. M6, Dartford, Severn, everything else is completely bypassable and even those are no great burden to avoid if you want. I was struggling to name toll roads beyond that when they asked.
Why is it that just because it's a car, it's somehow ingrained in your consciousness as more important than all the other freedoms you're having methodically stripped from you? Personally, I pay a couple of hundred pounds in "road tax" every year. That's a pittance. I pay more tax on my phone contract than on my car usage, and that includes the price of a phone! What's that equate to? Fixing one pothole a year? And then you have tax on fuel, which probably pays the wear my tyres cause to paint on the road and not one percent of the cost of the shit my car spews out.
My Italian friends pay a road tax, the same for petrol as we do (almost to the pence when you convert from Euro to pounds), and they pay at EVERY motorway change they ever make. You go one junction and you pay. You go change from major motorway A to motorway B and you pay again. And there is often no viable alternative whatsoever.
And do you hear them moan? No.
If you think Galileo is there to charge you for road usage, wait ten years. If there is road usage charges, likely it'll be a manual system (like tolls) like EVERY OTHER EUROPEAN COUNTRY HAS. Fancy technology in your car won't filter down to the populous for decades at least, even with mandatory laws. And certainly not if it relies on positioning networks that can be jammed and communications networks out in the middle of nowhere to talk back.
Honestly, paranoia is fine, but this is just rubbish.
What's Galileo's purpose? To tell the US to stuff their GPS systems up their bottom and provide more profit in scientific data and commercial usage (planes, boats, etc.) than any amount of road tax could generate in it's lifetime.
Wow, that is quite a bit of diatribe, but the bottom line is this: Notwithstanding stealth taxes such as scameras and parking charges, 33 billion GBP is paid to the treasury by road users. This is way in excess of our extremely poorly maintained and poorly designed roads.
My question would be more: Why is it that when we get behind the wheel of a car we are supposed to accept intrusions that we would otherwise deem so unacceptable that there would be riots on the streets (and yes I am including all those cameras that you mention) Let me sit in your garden taking pictures through your window if you disagree.
I could not care less what the Italians care about; if they are dumb enough to jump over a cliff then I see no reason to follow them.
As for why Galileo? - A. Metadata.
I do not know how old you are, but when they brought in the driving licence it was never dreamed of that it would be used in the way that it is used today. If you cannot see that corrupt governments will gradually use function creep then you are going around with blinkers on.
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