Evil bollards.

Anything that might make the evil bastards regret having installed these nasty traps.

What about a bank robbery (ala The Italian Job) where the getaway involves either lowering the bollards for the getaway cars, raising them in front of the police or lowering them as needed to create a traffic jam as needed to block pursuit?

I like pedestrian areas, anything that keeps chelsea tractors out of cities is a wonderful thing

martin

There's other things that can be done about "Chelsea tractors" like taxing them off the road, quadrupling their congestion charge - or better yet make their owners take the HGV test.

ach no, they, the driver has to donate a pint of blood for every 10 miles they drive, or a sacrifical child instead of road tax, annually true christian ethics :-)

martin

Require the owner of each vehicle to push it one mile every year? That would make a Fiat 500 much more attractive.

And disabled drivers?

Yep, you win 10 more point for catching a disabled driver, 15 for a wheelchair, and 100 for a skateboarder

martin

They get two bollard installers to push them!

My guess would be that something like an RFID device activates lowering the bollards, since the bus driver will slow and/or stop until the bollards lower imprecise triggering isn't a problem. Here's where the guesswork on my part really starts - I think RFID is probably too imprecise to trigger raising the bollards behind the bus and could potentially raise the bollards before the bus is clear. A logical assumption is that as the bollards lower, a IR beam is activated across the road - which remains interrupted until the bus passes.

Chances are any such beam would be modulated and the sensor have some form of frequency discriminator so it can't be affected by ambient light, so all anyone need do is find the modulation frequency, build a modulated IR beam emitter and reflect the beam off the side of a bus passing over the bollards.

Or it may have a magnetic loop buried underground, waiting a couple of seconds after the metal lump clears before giving the raise signal.

It could be an interesting experiment to attempt to kill the front end of the RFID reader. Maybe a large cap, charged to a Kv or two, dumped into a coil resonant at the RFID freq would fry it. The designer may not have thought of this threat, so has insufficient protection designed-in. OTOH, he may have.

This topic came up on one of the electronics groups recently, the OP was suspected of being an enterprising shoplifter as they wanted a small portable "EMP" device out of a converted disposable camera flash unit, modified to dump the capacitor charge into a salvaged RFID antennae.

What you suggest would need a bit more power than a disposable flash - say a car CDI box + 10x NiCd, a good choice for switching the capacitor charge into an antennae coil is those Siemens gas discharge transient suppressors, I think the sustaining current is something like 70A.

Its doubtful anyone could plant such a device close enough to do any permanent damage, but operated nearby it might swamp the front end.

I almost got T-boned by a skateboarder once. He shot out into the street and missed me by about an inch (2.5 cm).

I'm tempted to put a big sign on the back of my car: "Caution: Taligaters will be spiked!" >:->

Cheers! Rich

It depends if you know where the RFID reader is, and how close you could get to it. "Closeness" is your friend

If in the ground, you could have the coil on the belly of your own car, so you should be able to drive right over it, and poof ! Of course, they would get a little irritated after the second time you did this.

Or maybe it's on a post near the bollard. That would be even easier, put the EMP device into your briefcase, stop next to the post while "answering your mobile phone" which just happened to ring right there, and again, poof !

Sure. And the moon is made of Bleu cheese. We ol' farts tend to design against anything that those of you with half-a-brain can wet-dream up ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Or, you could just wait your f****ng turn, like sane people do.

Thanks, Rich

Its not about waiting a turn, its about local authorities limiting access to roads that all our taxes paid for. In this instance the road is restricted to busses and certain utilities.

Admittedly the drivers in the clip got caught trying to beat the system, but wrecking someone's vehicle like that is unnecessarily harsh and unnecessarily dangerous - just look at the clip where one of the pedestrians has to pull her pushchair with a small child in it as the back end of one of the cars slews round on impact!

They have plenty of cameras and they have ANPR so why conduct enforcement in such a recklessly dangerous manner?!!!

ian field wrote: > >

There are bus lanes and such in the states as well. You're supposed to stay out - unless you're the bus driver in your bus. Apparently on your side of the pond it's so much a problem that the 'bollards' are needed. I saw your video and the only people with damaged vehicles DID IT TO THEMSELVES trying to weasel through where they weren't authorised to be. Play by the rules and you won't have these problems.

BTW, with my Prius and the 'California clean air vehicle' permit I can drive in the carpool lane as the sole occupant.

GG

I don't share your confidence. Firstly, who says an ol'fart designed this?

Secondly, history is littered with crap products that have virtually no EMV protection.

A relative of mine used to spend most of his day replacing PIR detectors with better ones that did not alarm with a cellphone, UHF CB, or Ham HT in the same building.

We have a very costly and fancy SMD rework station that goes nuts when anybody keys one of the above devices in the room.

I'm doing a bit of research right now on a GPS-guided agricultural machine that loses the plot when an RC transmitter is operated up to some several hundred metres away.

And 3 examples are just the tiniest tip of an damm big iceberg.

Yep, them old farts sure cover all the bases.