IRT to Scott Voigt (NATCA Safety)
I think you can say that technology can be prone to failure, unreliable and untrustworthy either because of its concept or unreliable due to its (in situ) design features.
You seem to be saying the latter i.e. criticising its hardware implementation. I recently spoke with a local Highways Dept Engineer who uses the treadles for traffic counters. They tell me that, short of vandalism, they've found that their pressure-sensitive traffic-counter treadles last very well, with service call-outs in times per year (vice times per month).... and that must equate to all sorts of weather conditions and a huge amount of traffic over them.
Dreadle sounds to me as though it would work (A-B/B-A etc). It would tend to eliminate the human factors failings that are always present in unmonitored surface radar displays.
I wouldn't like to be the FAA Administrator after the next big one, having declared (together with the NTSB) that runway incursions are their number one safety priority) having to say publicly: "What's Dreadle? Never heard of it."