[talk-au] school zones

[John Smith]

--- On Tue, 23/6/09, Stephen Hope <slhope at gmail.com> wrote:

> How accurate are you wanting to go?
> To be truly accurate, you're going
> to need to take weekends and school holidays into account
> as well.

Weekends are easy to account for, school holidays aren't as easy but I'm sure some where there would be suitable information, and you just build it up from there as to which school zone applies to which dates. Police have been known to book people on pupil free days in NSW and possibly other states.

> Actually, on a serious note, I'd love to have a routing
> algorithm that
> avoids schools during child dropoff and pickup hours when
> possible.  I
> don't mind the slowing down bit, it's the waiting 10
> minutes while the
> school empties out across the road, playing russian
> roulette with
> triple parked parents in 4WD's and dodging school buses
> that seem to
> have forgotten they have indicators that bugs me.

I don't think they knew what an indicator was in the first place.

Also the slow downs that are the most annoying at like the Pacific Highway or Epping Rd in Sydney to name but a few, 3 lanes each way and you have to slow down for stupid school zones that kids shouldn't be going near if they're likely to get hit.

As I said before, it's easy enough to work out weekends, school dates are another matter but at least aussie schools tend to have the same dates across the entire state, unlike in the US.

The question still remains how to best uniformly tag these areas so other things like routing can take advantage of it.