Less Serious

This post is kind of like a Sunday Selections. I haven't posted many photos of late. 

The tram approaches the tram stop at New Preston Tram Depot stop from the distance. Once out of the city, trams only stop if someone wants to get on or off. If you sit on the seat within the shelter, you can't see the tram coming and if the driver can't see you as they approach, they could go straight past. Meanwhile, the other end of the shelter is clear glass. A Yarra Trams advertising slogan once was 'Think like a passenger', for their staff. Perhaps Yarra Trams should have thought like a passenger at this tram stop. Idiots, idiots and imbeciels. . 

Jass with her friend Amber. 

Stomach unprotected and eyes closed. She trusts us.

They could do with a repaint, but I do like these Russian style dolls. 

Monday was a dramatic sunrise. 

And there was more drama below where a motorist got in the way of a tram in an unimaginable manner and they bumped together.

 

It was all over in ten minutes, I guess details quickly exchanged. The car driver was wearing a full length overcoat while driving, far too restrictive for driving, in my opinion. You know, cars do have heating and can make you very toastily warm.

Incompetents abound. 

Dashcam caught a crash

Yesterday was a bit of a disaster. Phyllis wanted to show me an incident that would be caught by dashcam, so I removed the SD card, brought it up to plug into my desktop. I am struggling a bit with the front and rear dash cams connectivity to my the app on my phone, but I'm getting there. 

We viewed the footage, showing one of two incidents he passed by in one trip. The first was a tipped over concrete mixer truck but other vehicles blocked most of the view.

I took the SD card back to the car to insert it into the camera unit and as I pushed it in, the camera fell off the windscreen. I also realised I had put the card in the wrong way and it was stuck. I tried to pull it out but made it worse, pushing it in further. I can't do this in semi darkness in the carpark, even with my phone torch. I unplugged the camera from the wires and tapped the unit on a hard car surface and the card disappeared altogether, somewhere inside the camera. Woe is me! Yes, I could hear the card rattle inside the unit. Back upstairs.

Kosov, help me. I gave him the jeweller's kit screwdrivers and went off on my errand, hoping he could extract the card. I returned and he had taken part of the camera apart. His opinion was that the card was not inside and had fallen out, so down we went and with our phone torches on to search the car where it may have fallen out. It was not found.

I was very sure the card was inside the unit somewhere, so Kosov used the AI Gemini to find out how to take the camera further apart. Later I asked him, couldn't you just find that using Google. Yes, he replied but it will take me much longer because of promoted ads, and a lack of detail where I will have to burrow down unknown holes. Gemini gave me an instant answer in about 10 seconds. 

Armed with information, he stripped the unit down to exposing its motherboard and and did find the card, carefully extracted it with tweezers and we reassembled the unit and put it back in the car and all was well. That was about an hour out of his day because of my stupidity. But really, that part of the camera was not designed well. I didn't force anything, and it all went terribly wrong. 

To to the incident. Traffic was banked up at an intersection. Phyllis did not know why. He gave a toot to the driver in front of him and then soon realised the driver was stuck, and felt so bad about the toot. The dash cam downloads separate files each of about two minutes in 4K definition, over 100mb for two minutes of recording. 

25 seconds in you can see there is an issue. 

30 seconds Phyllis tooted the car horn.

42 seconds it is clear the driver in front is trying to change lanes. One driver to the right hesitates to let the car in but the driver in the car front did not pick up on this. The next driver was rather impolite for not letting the car diverge into the right lane. 

Then Phyllis diverged left around the obstacle. And what was the obstacle? It becomes visible at 50 seconds. A learner driver on the wrong side of a three lane road facing oncoming traffic. On the face of it, a terrible mistake by the learner driver. But let's look closer.

The car is a Royal Automobile Car Club of Victoria car, displaying learner driver L plates, meaning there is a student at the wheel, with a driving instructor who has foot and perhaps steering controls on their side of the car. It simply cannot end up where it is without a very good reason. Move on to 58 seconds and freeze, and you can see the car as been hit. I suspect it was hit and spun around by another driver and I doubt the L driver in the RACV car was at fault.  

YouTube is as ridiculous as it is absurd about background music, and because there is music playing in the background of the car, for copyright issues, in some countries this clip won't be viewable. YouTube even informed me of the two songs being played. Hey, it's better at recognising music than Shazam.  

AI Slop

Artificial Intelligence Slop. This is a term I've heard used and I've seen examples of AI Slop. This photo below is a prime example of AI Slop, as this photo pretended to a Melbourne Station in St Kilda but the building was actually London's Old Bailey Court.

In the 1950s there was a serious train crash at the Washington DC Union Station. The short YouTube video about the crash was interesting enough and sounded very factual, but what can be trusted in the video? I took a screenshot towards the end of the clip and something didn't seem quite right in what I was watching. Can you see it? Actually, I've seen a another AI Slop in the still. 

Trams are remarkably safe

Trams are very safe, and even if you are motorist and hit by one, the tram driver will have probably already applied emergency brakes. It is rare for the tram driver to be at fault when trams and cars collide. I assume it is still in the road laws that you must give way to trams at all times. 

I would guess most tram versus cars/vans/trucks happen when a motorist makes a 'U turn' in front of a tram. The plaintive wail will go out, 'I didn't see the tram'. Yeah, right, this great big vehicle carrying up to 200 passengers. What happened was they did think to check if there was a tram travelling along tram tracks. Who would have thought?  Next crash results might be failing to give way to a tram at a roundabout.

I've never been a passenger on a tram where it has been in an accident. 

Maybe I've used some of these photos before, but no matter. I want to clear the folder. It would be nice to credit the recent photos, but they just appeared at some point without a credit.

McMahons Point, Sydney. This was a bad one, as I recall. People were deaded. 

Flinders and Swanston Streets, Melbourne. A brake failure, as I recall. 

Taylor Square, Oxford Street, Sydney. It's a bit busy.

While in black and white, it is not a very old photos. 

Gold Coast, Queensland. The motorist drove onto tram tracks for some reason. Such an action caused issues. 

Nothing to see here, except for a tram on fire. I think our fire department are taught how to deal with train and tram fires, needed because of the electrics. 

Yep, as I said, a U turns. 

Oh, trams hitting trams is not good. St Kilda. 

Tram only signs completely ignored did not result in smooth city driving. 

There was an incident

I took Kosov for a ride on VLine train yesterday. I think he was soon satisfied by the journey. He enjoyed my excitement when the train cracked 160 km/h, 100mph. I mucked up the platform number and I think I know why. The problem is the ultimate terminus names. Large on screens should be Geelong, Ballarat, Shepparton and Bendigo, then in a smaller font, the ultimate terminus. Wendouree, Marshall etc is just hopeless. 

I was going to take Kosov to Sunbury but because of my confusion, we just missed the train. It was an hour until the next one so I thought we'd catch the next VLine service to Melton. None of the stations we stopped at along the way seemed to have shops, but at the Melton terminus there were some and we had some food and a drink in a bakery. The VLocity trains are quite comfortable if a little noisy from the motors. Unfortunately on our return, as a same looking train had terribly hard seats. My god, 40 minutes of sitting on such awful seats is enough. How was this allowed!

Anyway, I didn't really mean to talk about personal stuffs in this post. There was an incident, a serious one on the street below.

I thought of describing what happened to my readers and translating it for those who drive on the wrong side of the road. I got to with the translation 'You are travelling on the right hand side of the road, with a dedicated cycling lane on your right. You are going to turn right at the next intersection and the cyclist is riding straight ahead, so you must give way to the cyclist on your right who is riding straight ahead'. And then my brain failed about travelling at making the turn. 

I hope the injuries the rider suffered are not serious but it didn't look great. I met the neighbour who has cameras on his balcony about three weeks ago. He is nice. The incident happened about a week later. 

In the clip the incident happens in the first few seconds. Clearly the motorist was in the wrong, but I also think the rider was not looking after their own safety. The car's left indicator was on and its intentions were clear. Riders need to be alert to stupid motorists for their own self preservation. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41NPLjAmn1E