Nerfing up Current Malaysian Road System: Is it possible?

taken from yussairi entry.

Nerfing up Current Malaysian Road System: Is it possible?

As I sat here, alone, while everyone else go off in search of fun somewhere out of the office, I stumbled upon two horrible news.
Both of them are about lorries vs cars, involving deaths and only a few hundred kilometers apart of each other. Plus, one of the victim vehicle doesn't even move, it was queuing to pay toll, only to have a hulking behemoth crush it from behind. How unfortunate. Hmm...
Perhaps it is time for current transportation cycle to get some revision. More often than not, accidents involving lorries crushing on smaller vehicles will definitely bring death, owing to the huge inertial moment of the larger vehicles. However hazardous a lorry/trailer is, they are vital to daily logistic businesses of the nation, so the solution lies somewhere else; the physics of an accident.

As stated earlier, a lorry can survive a crash against vehicles smaller than its size because of its mass and durability. On the other hand, the smaller vehicles will take the full brunt of the crushing damage and a lot of the lorry's kinetic energy will be passed down as a brain-splattering, bone-shattering, muscle-smashing impulse energy upon the vehicle's occupant. More often than not, it is this impulse that kills. The effect of the Newtonian law of physics in this kind of accident is unavoidable; an equilibrium must be reached in such situation, resulting in the smaller objects receiving the larger portion of energy.

One crazy idea that I've thought of during my school days is this:

We all know that the impulse created in a collision is caused by the mass of a body multiplied by its speed and added by the differentials of many other factors such as wind speed, friction and the like. In case of brakes failing at high speed, what can lessen the kinetic energy?
Why, the simplest way is to disperse the body along the movement path, creating smaller objects of lesser mass that goes around at random projection angles. Self-destruction. Do not bother to steer or pull up the brakes during an eventual accident. The easiest way is to blow up the crashing vehicle before it slams onto other vehicles. Initial explosion of the chassis and the trailing container can throw up as many as 70% of materials, mostly glasses, steel and plastics into other directions, reducing the object's mass. This way, instead of a 100% mass slamming in a straight line onto an object, maybe there will be 30% of burning wreckage slamming in a straight line and 70% others going anywhere else. A good place to install the destructor would be in around the engine and wheel systems, the heaviest part of a lorry. Lack of movement power caused by the initial destruction of the movement gears (wheels, axles, etc.) build up friction, which can slow down the lorry enough to reduce the impulse upon collision.
The limitation of such grisly method is the trailer content, and the will of the driver itself. For trailers, the container may be designed to be detached upon explosion, if it is small enough. Drivers, on the other hand, will find it hard to pull the self-destruct trigger and get out just in time. But, death of one is better than death of many, right? Plus, the loathsome condition of many lorries on Malaysian road makes it all the sweeter to just blow them up. The horrible maintenance of lorries is the primary reason behind the freak lorry accidents of Malaysia anyway, with stories about suddenly failing brakes, detached wheel and so on and so forth.

Self-destruct mechanism may be a strange and dangerous way for an accident prevention plan, and even more so in Malaysia where the dispersed container may fly around hurting other road-users. But, it is stranger still to see how, despite the massiveness of trailers buzzing along the highways of Europe and the U.S., there are relatively few lorry-accidents. Of that, I have found a striking similarity.

Segregation. Some of the highways there are segregated steeply for each form of vehicles. The road experts there know that a collision between bodies of more-or-less equal masses, for example, a bike vs a bike, yield higher survival rate and less critical injuries. In Malaysia, such segregation has been enforced in some of the highways, but not all. Perhaps it is time to extend the segregation to everywhere else.

Current law may be adequate enough to prevent accidents involving large vehicles, but it is the enforcement that matters. We must put a stop to drug addicts and reckless people becoming drivers, and put up a well-disciplined and well-trained person in stead. Some people just don't bother; I've seen near-tumbling trailers rushing along a busy road at about 140 km/h. The theoretical energy carried by the speeding may be about 10 to the power of 9 Newtons or more. Thus, the impulse generated by a sudden collision would sum up to about 10 to the power of 15 Newtons or more, depending on the time frame; the more sudden the collision, the higher the impulse.

Whatever the feasible solution is, we have to make it quick. We don't want to make yet another person receiving a scraped-up brain blobs and a few rib shreds of his/her loved one at the morgue.

May 30, 2007 in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (3)
May 28, 2007
4th Week at New Workplace: Libertas!

One day to close one month of work here. It means that it is one month since I last saw the venerable guys and gals of the SCS Faction. Also, it means that it was a month since I last saw Ankh and Deli zapping by my car on the highway. Duh.

Tit for tat, I saw many interesting things at this place. As stated earlier in my log, liberty is rampant; the workers come and go as they please, run around playing in the office and pay no heed to the higher management's raffle. In my previous workplaces, such reckless attitudes would warrant an entrenchment suit from the HR department. Here, apparently it has not occurred as far as the oh-so-confidential staff records are concerned (heh, try hiding data from a data miner). How do they do that? Simple.
Even though they worked at their own pace, they really do their jobs. Even if they decide to walk in at 9 AM and walked out at 9.10 AM, if their work is done, the tactical management deemed it alright. Working at own pace have its merits; most programmers, myself included, just could not get their brain logics moving in the heat of the day, so ditching day's work for a nocturnal stint is routine. It's not indiscipline, it's just less-than-normal work hours.
Another reason is that they know their rights and their position. In a software-oriented firm, programmers are key staffs and the main drive. Firing a programmer, even a lowly one on the basis of indiscipline is very, very risky, since it is easier finding a production line worker than a trained computer scientist. Well, everyone can do repetitive manual labor, but few can tolerate the mathematically stressing pressure a computer scientist faces everyday. By exploiting these facts, the workers here enjoy a level of freedom uncommon in most places.