The Pacific Highway between the Gold Coast and Brisbane is probably one of the busiest roads in Australia. In sections an eight-lane freeway, it carries a constant stream of traffic both day and night. Only just completed in its current form, workmen are still planting bushes in the median strip and along its edges, working under floodlights at night to lessen the disruption to traffic. The freeway, marked at 110 km/h, has temporary speed limits of 60 km/h while this final work is being completed. Usually the lane next to the workers is closed right off, with a kilometre-long line of orange cones used to demarcate this.
However, drivers are reluctant to slow down - there are still three full-width lanes in operation and by the time they reach the area of roadworks, many people have been driving at freeway speeds for hours as they make the long haul from Sydney northwards. So, as you'd expect, there is a police presence to enforce the lower temporary limit. What you might not expect, though, is that the police four-wheel drive parked in the closed lane has its blue and red flashing lights on, in addition to hazards and normal headlights. The police vehicle, usually located where the workers are at greatest risk, is made as visible as possible. And yes, the police operating the car do have a radar gun - but who can decry that?
Not only are the police intelligently located so that their car physically shields the workers from any impact that might occur if a passing car strays into the closed lane, but they also are nabbing only those drivers who are either foolhardy or completely unobservant of the shouted police presence - and the proximity of the workers and the speed limit signs.
Gawd, with more policing like that, the police might start regaining the respect utterly lost by the multitudes of speed cameras located at the bottom of hills on excellent roads passing through intersection-free terrain...
Until the current model Honda K20A DOHC i-VTEC engine, all Honda four-cylinders have rotated backwards - anticlockwise. (The V6 engines have always turned the conventional way - clockwise.) And why did Honda for so many years build their engines to operate in this manner?
Famous Japanese automotive journalist Jack Yamaguchi, writing in the June 2001 issue of Automotive Engineering International tells it like this:
"[Previously] all Honda transverse fours have turned counterclockwise, with the transmission on the right. This oddity was the legacy of the SOHC inline two-cylinder engine designed by engineering prodigy Nobuhiko Kawamoto, who years later ascended to the presidency of the company. The pint-size twin 0.360-litre engine powered the Life light car of the early '70s. To provide enough foot space for the driver, the engine was pushed to the left and made to turn counterclockÂwise so that it could drive the inline transaxle without an extra gearset. The first-generation Civic engine, a 1.2-litre unit, was essentially two Life engines coupled together. The unconventional design wisdom stuck and has since been the hallmark of all Honda 4s."
So you see, there was once a really good reason for that odd direction of spinning!
A few weeks ago I was asked if, when I look back at the articles that I produced early in my career as an automotive writer, I am still happy with them. In short, the answer is 'yes' - but with one proviso. The first few hundred articles that I typed for modified car magazines did have (at least!) one deficiency - they were under-written. By that I mean that I'd tend not to flesh out skeletons, fill in the gaps and blank pauses that people reading those articles must have sometimes experienced.
This was brought home to me vividly in the last day or so.
I recently decided to recycle an idea that I wrote about a number of years ago - that of monitoring the output of voltage-type engine management sensors, and using an external module to turn on a light or trip a relay when the sensor output reached a certain level. It's an ideal way of switching stuff like electric radiator cooling fans - you just use the output of the engine management system's coolant temp sensor. The sensor can still keep right on working for the management system - but it now has another function as well.
And rather than start from scratch, I dug out the original text file for the article. Dated August 1, 1995, it is the 51st article I did on my then new laptop - and I'd probably done 200 or so articles on my electronic typewriter previous to that. So I cut and pasted until it appeared on my current monitor, and started revising it to bring it into line with AutoSpeed's style and editorial policy.
And it wasn't very long before I realised that the new version was going to need to be longer - much longer. The original was 1600 words; already the new version is over 2000 words. And instead of just a few pics, this article will have more than fifteen photos.
And it made me ponder: was it just that my depth of writing has changed - that I now see a greater need to cross the 'T's' and dot the 'I's'? Yes, that's certainly one of the reasons - but there's also another.
In those days I was writing for mostly one-shot magazines, where a publisher would produce literally a new title every three months. Commodore Power, then Powerful Commodores, then Commodores, the Mighty Power! - that sort of thing. Each would be inscribed as "First Edition", or - sometimes - "Collectors' Edition". It was an approach designed both to suck people into buying an apparently new magazine, and also to fool that diehard enemy of magazine publishers - newsagents - from pulling the mag off the shelves too soon.
But for a technical writer it meant something else. Articles had to be tight - sometimes too tight for best reader understanding. This was so for four main reasons:
- the payment per article was sufficiently low that spending too much time writing and photographing wasn't worth a freelancer's effort;
- the level of reader who typically bought the magazines was - shall we say - fairly unsophisticated and so their concentration span was deemed to be very short;
- to sell lots of copies the publisher had to jam lots brief articles into the magazine;
- and lastly, there was not ever going to be a second issue of that title to allow the running of any Part 2 in a series - so all the article had to fit into the one issue!
As a result, in those days I crammed the concepts and the background and the action and pics into one mid-length article. And at the time, I probably didn't see any shortcomings in that approach.
But it has now made me reflect about something else as well. Over the last few years of editing AutoSpeed, I have started to forget that utterly horrible space limitation of paper magazines. The cost of paper and printing are simply so high that it's a major decision to decide whether to, for example, increase the page count by eight pages.
When I edited a print magazine, it was a bi-monthly pitched battle: how many editorial pages could I have this issue?
P-l-e-a-s-e can it be 75?
Please?
(Advertising of course always got page preference over content.)
The publisher would be staring down into the gun barrel, juggling the huge costs against the advertising inflows. And when he struck the editorial page count a mortal blow, I as Editor would have to try to juggle the content so that it would be good enough to keep sales going, so that then advertisers would be happy with the response and keep advertising (more mag sales = more happy advertisers).
And so the tough decisions had to be made: each cut would reduce that issue's worth from the grand plan that I had originally envisaged. Would it be better to simply halve this article - perhaps jam it into a single DPS (double page spread)? Or would it be better to keep the original (expensively paid for) artist's layout and simply take out a whole article to keep for the next issue? But wouldn't that make a hole in this edition? So what about cutting back the pages for this feature car, and making this buyers' guide a much simpler layout that didn't take up as much room - but as a result, looked terrible? Nope, better to pull back the word count on this other article...
Aaaaaaaaghhhh.
But that was then... this is now!
With the content of one-hundred-and-forty issues of AutoSpeed having been laid out on the whiteboard in front of me, I now take the web surfeit of editorial space completely for granted. I can take up as much room as I like with any article or series of articles: space for pictures, for text, for examples, for breakout boxes, for expansions and discussions.
So, if only for space reasons, the article in this issue on the engine management sensor switch is far better than the original article I pecked out six years ago...
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