How do you handle crossing roads in a straight line?
Hi folks,
so, the subject says it all.
You know the situation, you're in a city, approach a road and vant to cross it. You're starting on a start of the crossing, and are expecting to end up on the opposite side, again, on the crossing.
But... Something goes wrong, and you end up out of crossing.
It can be just few centimeters, but also few meters, and I once even managed to make a full circle and return to the side where I started without knowing it.
Though that happened really just once, and on a road without cars in time when this happened, so that was most likely the cause why I didn't notice the enormous turn I gained.
But anyway, all deviations from a direct line are unpleasant, whether they're small or big. Especially if the terrain is designed in such a way, that it's not possible to tell on which side did you land, so you could make a right correction.
T like intersections are also likely to cause problems, as if I'm crossing the leg of the T symbol, there is a chance, that I'll end up walking on a road instead of landing on the end of the crossing. Especially if there is low traffic, this can be quite dangerous and thus I'm always taking additional measures like time tracking to verify, that I didn't end up on a road instead of pavement.
But these measures only help to detect the deviation, not to prevent it.
Sound of car engines can be used to slightly improve possible errors, as they can elliminate some directions. The limits are however, that at least two sound sources are necessary in order to determine the 2D position, car engines are often quite silent when they stand on one place (some modern cars even turn them off completely), two or more engines can disrupt each other and even if the sound scene is ideal, determining the exact position based on them is much harder than one would expect, due to the non-linear nature of sound localization.
Plus, if the engines scene on an intersection is complicated enough, I sometimes find myself focusing far more on the cars than on walking in a straight line, what can also have negative effects.
One could say "hey, just wait until the scene clears out", but this is not always possible, as many drivers will wait until you do something and if you don't, they'll rather do something to inform you that you can go, instead of moving.
I initially thought, that this will be something that will improve with time. However, after three years walking about 1,5 km through a whole city to my school practically everyday, it's not like on my first walk of course, but the improvement is neither that big.
I still end up out of crossing from time to time.
Thus, I have developed a quite promising method, which if it proves itself, will have the potential to send this problem to the past for ever.
However, before I release it, I would like to know, what are your experiences of crossing roads in a straight line? Do you also end up out of crossings? What are your methods to prevent it? How successfull they are?
Best regards
Rastislav
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