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Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

• FroshKiller 10y ago
  I'm a homeowner and an active Waze user. The street I live on is not "my" street. It's a public street that any licensed driver may use. I did have an issue with drivers coming around a blind curve too quickly to be safe, though, so I did what these homeowners ought to be doing and contacted my local government about getting my street assessed for a traffic calming project. The city created a three-way stop before the curve that has slowed traffic on the street and seems to have reduced non-local traffic. Sure, that project took time and may not have even happened in the first place if the city hadn't judged it worth doing, but that's the appropriate course in my opinion. Anything else just feels like NIMBY entitlement.
  • rhinoceraptor 10y ago
    I got a ticket for one of these types of things, some local ordinance prohibiting through traffic during rush hour. It's a great revenue generator for the local PDs. Lots of one-off traffic laws that people passing through won't (and really, can't) know about.
    • mikeash 10y ago
      Don't things like that usually have signs?
      • zyxley 10y ago
        I'm sure they do, somewhere that nobody actually driving on one of the streets in question will ever see it. > "But the plans were on display..." > "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them." > "That's the display department." > "With a flashlight." > "Ah, well the lights had probably gone." > "So had the stairs." > "But look, you found the notice didn't you?" > "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"
        • mikeash 10y ago
          In my experience, they're usually posted fairly prominently (like, at the same height as other signs, next to the road, looking like a street sign) and people are just oblivious.
          • coldpie 10y ago
            I once got a no parking ticket on a huge, wide open residential street with no posted signs. Turns out the city population sign at the city limit, half covered with cattails, had a small "no parking 2 AM - 5 AM within city limits" sign. Pure revenue generation from non-citizens.
            • mikeash 10y ago
              There certainly are cases like this. There's one little town I drive through sometimes which for a long time dropped the speed limit directly from 55MPH to 35MPH coming into town, and where the 35MPH limit sign was hidden behind a tree until you were about 3ft away from it. In what I am sure is a complete coincidence, this town has a $200 fine for speeding above the state penalty. Thankfully I never got hit with it, and they finally trimmed the tree after many years. But most places display it prominently, and people just don't care. For every case like yours, there are a hundred places with obvious signs like "No turn on red" where people still turn on red.
              • ellyagg 10y ago
                I've obeyed dozens of "No turn on red" signs in my life, but I rarely see "No thru traffic" signs and until this thread, didn't really understand what the point of them was. I'm surely not hyper-vigilant about spotting and obeying them. You could blame me for this, or we could ponder the implications of the different probabilities of various sign types being obeyed, and whether high rates of disobedience might indicate fairness issues that should be carefully managed.
                • mikeash 10y ago
    • morninj 10y ago
      There's no way that the trickle of revenue is greater than the cost of enforcement. Officer salary and benefits, equipment maintenance, and all the costs associated with the court system...
      • EGreg 10y ago
        How do you know there's no way? At the very least, it might be paying for itself....
      • aggie 10y ago
        The marginal cost of those items, for the police anyway, might be close to 0.
      • superuser2 10y ago
        Suburban PDs tend to be vastly overstaffed for the level of serious crime and bored most of the time. Mine spends the majority of its hours on mall shoplifters and dogs at the park.
      • mikeash 10y ago
        The use of traffic tickets as supplemental revenue is a time-honored tradition with many real-world examples. Some places fund their entire police department this way. I don't know why you'd think it couldn't be greater than the cost, either. It takes, what, five minutes to write a ticket, which might average $100? That's $1,200/hour of revenue. No way the officer costs that much, even including benefits and equipment. Most people just pay tickets, they don't contest them, so court costs will be small.
        • HillaryBriss 10y ago
          In LA, for example, most of the driving infractions are violations of the California vehicle code, not city-specific vehicle codes. And so it turns out that a very substantial portion of ticket revenues go to the state, not the city. California even has a law preventing cities from creating these kinds of local vehicle code laws that could generate local revenue.
    • underwater 10y ago
      "No Thru Traffic" signs are enforceable!? What law does that fall under?
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • forrestthewoods 10y ago
        A law that says "no thru traffic"? The real question would be "what law prevents that from being written into law". To which the answer is probably nothing.
        • ctdonath 10y ago
          Even having such a law preventing certain laws does little. There's a well-known top-level law stating a particular right "shall not be infringed". Infringing laws abound nonetheless, with most judges disinclined to invalidate them.
          • knieveltech 10y ago
            Alas if they'd only left out the word "militia"...
            • protomyth 10y ago
              Militia had a specific meaning to the founders. Alas, if people today would study what the words they used actually meant.
              • knieveltech 10y ago
                Conversely, if folks got treatment for their paranoia and compensation issues we wouldn't be literally awash in guns so there'd be nothing to debate.
                • 10y ago
  • revelation 10y ago
    I may own property on your street but that doesn't mean I can build a garbage incinerator on it. It's a zoning issue, and indeed there are already provisions that e.g. large trucks may not use some residential streets. Pouring more concrete is not the solution, it's a policy problem, particularly when rat runs are used to circumvent congestion charges. (That's not to say we shouldn't build more traffic calming for residential streets; we should do that merely because many traffic planners are stuck in a 1950s mentality and design residential streets that feel like a highway, hostile to anyone not speeding through them at excessive speeds.)
    • iamdave 10y ago
      I may own property on your street but that doesn't mean I can build a garbage incinerator on it. Maybe not, but I think the conceit here isn't about what you do on your property vs. utilization of public roads by...well...members of the public.
      • dap 10y ago
        I think the counter is that the rights of various parties here are not black and white. Restrictions are put in place (in the incinerator case, on a private landowner; in the traffic case, on the public at large) in the common interests of local community members. You _do_ have a say in what happens on your street, even though you don't own it.
      • varjag 10y ago
        Here (Norway) municipality driveways within residential suburbs are designed based on amount of households and parking spots permitted in the area. Using them for huge amounts of through traffic would violate zoning rules and is plain unsafe.
    • kpil 10y ago
      I think the best way is to design the residential roads so that you have to drive really slow on them. I think the best idea is to do build the roads so that there is a single middle lane, surrounded by nice cobblestone refuges that is possible to drive on slowly. Also add some space for bicycles and pavements for pedestrians.
  • gaius 10y ago
    So Waze makes profits and the taxpayer foots the bill? That's why these so-called "disruptive" companies annoy so many people. Unless of course Waze paid the full cost of that little town planning and civil engineering project? But I doubt it.
  • astral303 10y ago
    Traffic calming hurts emergency service response. Ambulances have to slow down to a crawl thru this "calming." Buyer beware.
    • Kluny 10y ago
      It's still easier to get through calming than it is to get through a street jammed with traffic.
    • FroshKiller 10y ago
      I mean, I don't think I've ever seen an ambulance stop for a stop sign. But even allowing that speed bumps will slow an ambulance down, it's not as though there would ever be 200 speed bumps delaying the ambulance by 10 minutes. If the ambulance arrives a few seconds too late, the ambulance was already several minutes too late to begin with.
      • JustSomeNobody 10y ago
        Speed bumps are smoother if taken at speed. Now, speed humps will send ya flying.
    • ipsi 10y ago
      I believe that ambulances and especially fire trucks have a wider wheelbase than cars and vans do, so what I've seen in a number of places is speed humps that don't cover the entire road. They're wide enough that you can't avoid them with a car, but narrow enough that an ambulance or fire truck won't notice them. Or possibly it's for buses.
      • skiningham 10y ago
        Where I live, the ambulances are just vans with modifications. I think the smaller-width speedbumps are either for busses or to cut costs. I've also seen a police cruiser Crown Vic with lights and sirens take some speed "humps" at a surprisingly high rate of speed without issue.
  • e40 10y ago
    I did have an issue with drivers coming around a blind curve too quickly to be safe, though, so I did what these homeowners ought to be doing and contacted my local government about getting my street assessed for a traffic calming project. I hope what happened in my neighborhood doesn't happen in yours. One person vetoed a stop sign that would have made our street much, much safer due to the blind curve and how fast people take it. The one home owner that objected scuttled the entire thing. Very frustrating.
    • sandworm101 10y ago
      One trick that I discovered was to hang not a sign, but simply something that looks like a high-visibility jacket. Drivers for a half second think it's might be a cop doing speed enforcement and slow down. I remember while at university seeing people slow because of an orange garbage garbage caught in a hedge 400m away. That bag was better at enforcing the speed limit than photo radar.
      • Spooky23 10y ago
        One of my parents neighbors took this a step further -- he bought a surplus blue Crown Vic, put a yellow day glow strip on one side and parked it on his land near the curb. At a glance, it looked like a state police cruiser.
        • massysett 10y ago
          I once saw a full-size, flat plastic dummy that looked like a police car from the side. Slowed everybody down too. It was only clear it was a dummy as you passed it.
    • drauh 10y ago
      I've seen one instance where homeowners in the neighborhood vetoed a proposal to have a centerline painted on a broad street through the neighborhood. Total width was probably about 3 lanes, and many people used it as a "cut through", and going pretty fast. However, painting a centerline would have made property values go down, the homeowners argued, as that would have meant that the street was no longer a residential low-traffic street.
  • kqr2 10y ago
    Palo Alto has a lot of these traffic calming measures and roadblocks to prevent traffic through local neighborhoods. Sometimes it can get out of hand. From http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/pub/nimby.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/pub/nimby.html Just a few months ago, in Palo Alto, residents near downtown put up a vicious collection of roadblocks to get cars off their streets. The folly was exposed when a thief escaped because the police chasing him were unable to figure out how to navigate through the warren of closed streets.
    • droopyEyelids 10y ago
      We don't actually have any information about whether that was folly or not. Let's say 2 children avoid a trip to the hospital over the next 5 years, but four thieves escape. That would be a perfectly acceptable compromise to me.
      • catawbasam 10y ago
        I disagree. At this point the neighbors have effectively privatized a public facility. They should have to pay 100%. (I'm a U.S. suburban Dad with 2 young kids who do stupid things on their bikes.)
      • skiningham 10y ago
        Suppose the ambulance has the same problem the police had.
      • CamperBob2 10y ago
        (Shrug) When I was a child, I was taught not to play in the street. Meanwhile, access for emergency vehicles can be pretty important for the rest of us.
        • knodi123 10y ago
          Yes, all children should be taught not to play in the street. But we should not have a death penalty for children whose parents don't do that correctly...
  • niels_olson 10y ago
    So, really, Waze is hastening the identification of previously unreported road hazards. Seems like a good deal for local governments and residents in the long term.
  • pnathan 10y ago
    > I'm a homeowner and an active Waze user. The street I live on is not "my" street. It's a public street that any licensed driver may use. This is the correct analysis. Unless it's a gated subdivision, the streets are operated by the government for the broad public benefit; not the local benefit of the homeowners.
    • Spooky23 10y ago
      By that argument, would you have an objection to me operating a horse carriage on a freeway?
    • niccaluim 10y ago
      It's the correct legal analysis, sure, but does it encourage considerate behavior? Does it help or hurt the goals behind zoning laws and traffic engineering? I think it's one-sided to write the whole problem off this way.
      • Dr_tldr 10y ago
        The implication that people who have more knowledge about a local area have more right to publicly maintained resources than those who don't is even more troubling. Maintaining unequal access to public resources is a form of corruption, discrimination, or both. A traffic engineer whose designs are only effective when there's information asymmetry is either A) dealing with impossible project restraints/requirements B) terrible at their job
        • shivsta 10y ago
          I agree that all information should be free for everyone, but your assessment is too harsh. Impossible projects are probably pretty common in many dense cities.
          • Dr_tldr 10y ago
            100% agree, it's usually not the fault of the engineers. But in a better system, they wouldn't face political pressure to tell people that indefinite growth without inconvenience or long term investment is possible.
  • imgabe 10y ago
    You have no idea. Takoma Park, the town mentioned in the article, is also a self-declared "Nuclear Free Zone". That is, trucks carrying nuclear weapons are not permitted to drive through the town. Not that any ever have, or would ever likely have reason to, or that there is any way they could enforce that if the military decided they needed to do that for some reason, but Takoma Park felt they needed to make that clear to the world.
  • lliamander 10y ago
    > Anything else just feels like NIMBY entitlement. I disagree. I also think there is a sense that our urban/suburban planning should serve more that just the interests of motorists, and should support activities other than just driving to/from work. My wife and I used to drive 45 minutes just to park on the outside of a nice residential neighborhood so we could take a walk. Now we can get to family, friends, parks, businesses, etc; just by walking. Traffic congestion for commuters is a problem, but that doesn't mean that all streets should be maximally employed to reduce that congestion.
    • hx87 10y ago
      The problem in your case is that the sidewalks were inadequate or nonexistent; the solution then would be to widen them at the expense of the streets, perhaps install more crosswalks, not preventing nonresident drivers from coming through.
      • lliamander 10y ago
        There were a number of issues involved, but you point out a major one. However, the street was already quite narrow; sidewalks only could have been added at the expense of private property (and in some cases, the houses were too close to the street for that to be feasible).
    • jonathankoren 10y ago
      It's infrastructure. Why shouldn't it be maximally employed? If it's not used, it's waste. Don't like fast traffic, do what the OP said, and have the city install stop signs or reduce lane width. The amount of traffic in the street is immaterial if you're walking on the sidewalks like you should be.
      • lliamander 10y ago
        I also said this in response to another post, but I thought it would be good to highlight here: You don't generally want your infrastructure at max load all the time. You pathways that aren't heavily used so that, if the heavily trafficked area becomes blocked, traffic can redirect to the alternate path without becoming a complete mess. Besides, just because it is not being employed to serve commuter traffic does not mean it is not being employed. As other people have pointed out: kids often play in the streets. I think this is a good thing, and I think making it safe to be out in your street makes it easier to connect with your neighbors helps foster a sense of community. Putting houses on courts/circles helps with this, because then it eliminates through traffic, but it isn't always possible.
  • AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    > The city created a three-way stop before the curve that has slowed traffic on the street and seems to have reduced non-local traffic. How is this not the same NIMBY entitlement? "There are too many people using this public road, let's make it more arduous to use and let someone else suffer the traffic." That doesn't actually reduce traffic, it only redirects it. And if the people now receiving the traffic respond in kind to restore the original balance all you've done is put up more stop signs, which cause vehicles to stop and then have to accelerate again, increasing air pollution and climate change and redirecting more money to terrorism-supporting countries.
    • corndoge 10y ago
      That escalation from stop signs to funding terrorists was entertaining to say the least
      • AnthonyMouse 10y ago
        Pretty much anything that requires vehicles to use their brakes funds terrorism because every stop requires subsequent acceleration. Sure, the net effect from adding one stop sign is negligible, but it's tragedy of the commons. If everybody does it then it adds up. And it's not just wasted fuel, it's wear on the vehicles (which harms used car reliability and negatively impacts the poor), stress on the vehicle occupants, time wasted, delayed emergency response time, etc. Multiply by a hundred million stop signs and turns into something worth optimizing.
        • dsfyu404ed 10y ago
          As automation comes about detroit and the EPA will lean on the people who write laws to do things like make 4 way stops into 2 way stops, make it legal to rolling stop at a right turn, get rid of red arrows at dedicated left turn lanes that don't cross 3 lanes of traffic, etc etc in order to save fuel. There will be a lot more flashing yellows in a few years.
        • plttn 10y ago
          So every single gallon of gasoline used in every country is all provided by conflict petroleum? By the same token, every plastic spork is funding terrorism.
  • celticjames 10y ago
    Roads are subject to wear and tear. Higher traffic means more wear and thus more repairs. Repairs for most roads come out of municipal budgets. Municipal budgets are paid for by property taxes. The homeowners bought that road. So who's got an entitlement problem here?
    • FroshKiller 10y ago
      The homeowners still, honestly. The homeowners don't pay higher taxes if their roads require more repairs. If anything, higher traffic on roads that frequently need repairs means lower property values, thus lower property taxes for those same homeowners. Anyway, point being the homeowners did not buy that road. Previous generations of taxpayers paid for the construction of most roads, and the current generations of taxpayers are paying upkeep on all muni roads, not just the ones they live on. Even if I agreed with you, most of the people taking residential detours are probably still local...which means they, too, paid for the roads!
  • analog31 10y ago
    In my view, the "entitlement" card can be played on anybody, which makes it meaningless. For instance, "Nobody owns this street, so I can do whatever I want with it," could be portrayed as being equally entitled.
    • int_handler 10y ago
      So, exercising the right to use a public street within the bounds of the law is considered entitlement?
  • Justsignedup 10y ago
    Speed bumps help a lot. These are barriers made especially for making sure people are not speeding down these usually quiet streets. If people are speeding, surprise surprise cops are helpful. Towns need to work WITH waze not against it. I can imagine towns REALLY cranking up fines to use speeders on usually quiet streets (where kids may be playing) to ensure that the money flows into creating appropriate barriers.
    • ThrustVectoring 10y ago
      Speed bumps usually kill more people by slowing down ambulances than they save by reducing vehicle speeds. The best way to keep a street quiet is to remove the cues that tell drivers that they can drive quickly. Narrow the street, remove the sidewalks, add trees and other visual noise to the margins, and remove lane markings. Replacing asphalt with gravel can also help (and is cheaper to maintain). You don't need to fine people to get them to slow down if the road is terrifying to drive on at more than 20 MPH.
      • arthurdenture 10y ago
        > Speed bumps usually kill more people by slowing down ambulances than they save by reducing vehicle speeds. I don't think you're going to find research to support that. At least, I couldn't. http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6419/do-speed-bumps-cause-more-deaths-than-they-save http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6419/do-speed-bu... has some interesting discussion of it. I'm a big fan of the other advice, though, about changing the road design to discourage speeding.
        • ThrustVectoring 10y ago
          Thanks for the link - apparently I need to flag "things I vaguely remember being as facts I read at some point" as "possibly an urban legend".
    • rconti 10y ago
      Speed bumps suck. They're put there to intentionally increase wear and tear to cars and have minimal impact on traffic speeds. It's only accelerated the arms race to buy bigger and taller vehicles so that you can plow over speed bumps ever faster. There was a neighborhood where I grew up that had speed bumps in a neighborhood that were smoothest if you hit them at about 40mph. That did nothing but INCREASE traffic speeds (myself included). We've got speed bumps in our neighborhood. They suck, and people just speed over them anyway. Ditto using stop signs as traffic calming measures. YAY, let's increase air pollution (fuel burnt), increase noise pollution (accelerating and braking vehicles), increase water pollution (brake dust and other byproducts) and waste everyone's goddamned time by making every single car come to a stop (regardless of cross traffic or pedestrians) just so that some NIMBY can think SOMETHING WAS DONE.
  • enoch_r 10y ago
    It's important to note that not all these debates take the shape of "homeowners vs. commuters." The article used Clinton Street in Portland as an example. Who was upset that Clinton street was being used as cut-through by impatient drivers? Homeowners along Clinton were among those calling for change, but the loudest voices calling for diverters to reduce through-traffic were people who commuted or traveled along Clinton through methods other than cars. People who biked or walked down Clinton were used to it being a pleasant, low-speed, low-volume road where they could ride with their kids without fear. "Neighborhood greenways" like Clinton make up a huge portion of Portland's bike infrastructure, and people using it to escape traffic on the major arterial 2 blocks north were destroying that. The roads don't belong to the people who live on them, but they don't just belong to drivers, either.
    • steveax 10y ago
      Yep, same thing happening in my 'hood (Sellwood) on Umatilla. With the Sellwood bridge construction the traffic on Tacoma has been worse and drivers have been dipping down to Umatilla to avoid it and cutting back in right before the bridge. It's a mess and especially galling as the vast majority of traffic over the Sellwood bridge originates in Clackamas county where the residents were too cheap to pitch in $5/year (yes, per year) to help pay for the new bridge.
  • mc32 10y ago
    And now those developments with convoluted one way in and out of a subdivision/neighborhood, which I used to loathe, and still do, seem like the perfect anti-dote to Waze re-routing...
• voiper1 10y ago
  I actually recall this... 15 years ago, living parallel to a busy street. The various extra stop signs didn't keep people from using it. As @FroshKiller said though, it's not "my street". However, it was still a problem: there were frequently people way over the speed limit when we'd hardly expect it...
  • RankingMember 10y ago
    Traffic calming measures (speed humps) in the area where I grew up seem to have cut down on people taking local roads to get around highway traffic.
  • theseatoms 10y ago
    > However, it was still a problem: there were frequently people way over the speed limit when we'd hardly expect it... Sounds like recourse should be attainable via law enforcement.
    • potatolicious 10y ago
      You can't ticket your way out of this problem - nor can you afford to over long periods of time. Stationing cops in enough places to actually discourage speeding is not practicable. There are fortunately lots of ways to fix this without stationing a cop every few blocks. Speed bumps are common, but imperfect. In my hometown on smaller residential streets struggling with too much through-traffic they've put traffic circles at the intersections. Locals coming home aren't much impacted but it heavily discourages fast through traffic. Another major issue is that suburban streets are simply too wide, many neighborhoods give more than the 12-foot standard width to a lane (itself a specification that is way too generous), and we know that wide lanes result in faster speeds as drivers feel safer (and everyone else feels less safe). Narrowing lanes have a proven effect of increasing driver awareness and reducing speed, and also reclaims land for use by actual people. The solution to traffic is intelligent redesign of streets - enforcement doesn't really work, especially at scale, and neither does simply telling people to stop doing bad things. Just like web engineering, user behavior is governed by what you build, not arbitrary rules that you attach to systems where it's easier to misuse them than use them properly.
• paulddraper 10y ago
  If it's faster to take a neighborhood street than the interstate, there's a problem. It's not normal. It sounds like residents are at war with transportation infrastructure instead.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • jschwartzi 10y ago
    Welcome to rush hour in every major city.
    • Piskvorrr 10y ago
      ...in America (where cities are actually built for cars and people are just annoying, barely tolerated parasites).
      • djrogers 10y ago
        Or London, or Paris, or Rome, or Shanghai, or Mexico City, or.... I'm sure there are shining paragons of traffic efficiency and urban design somewhere in the world, but you're not exactly doing a good ob of pointing them out here.
        • Piskvorrr 10y ago
          London, Paris, Rome - all have a gasp workable public transport (can't speak for Shanghai or MC), dwarfing the vehicular traffic. Unless I had no option to choose at all, separated public transit beat the car traffic each and every time; even the delay of leaving the car at the outskirts and taking the train downtown is quicker than hopping along, a meter a minute (and then getting the privilege of hopping around blocks, trying to find a parking spot, with everyone else doing the same). Not the buses, of course; those get stuck in traffic like everyone else - but the trains get you wherever. Yes, I understand it's unfashionable, and you don't get a coffee cup holder or your own comfy chair for the whole trip ;) But it works. (Yes, there are other people on the metro. Well if you can't stand people, what are you doing in a city - which is a concentrated blob of people by definition?)
• JoshTriplett 10y ago
  This quote seems very telling: > It used to be that only locals knew all the cut-through routes, but Google Maps and Waze are letting everyone know So they don't have a problem with people cutting through as long as they're "locals"; it's when the outgroup starts doing the same thing that people get up in arms. If the through traffic is breaking traffic laws, that's a solvable problem. If the street has insufficient safety measures on it, that's also a solvable problem; see the comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11846812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11846812 for an example of getting the road improved. But if the problem is that the neighborhood street is actually a better route than the arterial roads and highways, then solve that problem; don't blame mapping software for noticing.
  • mikeash 10y ago
    That could just be about quantity, not groups. If only locals do it, that's a relatively small amount of traffic. If outsiders join in, that could be orders of magnitude more. I do agree with the overall point. If your local road is an attractive route and people use it to go places, don't blame the messenger. But it doesn't have to be about tribalism.
    • drewcrawford 10y ago
      Of course it is necessarily about tribalism. If it were not we could just install an access gate that limits the throughput of the road to X cars per hour (without regard to whether you live on it or not) and consider the problem resolved. But a homeowner would oppose having an equal share with any other citizen for a road on which they live. Or, to see this the other way: consider a driver shrouded in a veil of ignorance, with the knowledge of what road he lives on and its traffic situation temporarily hidden from him. He sees a shortcut through a neighborhood that may be his, but it's statistically unlikely to be in his large city. He takes it.
      • mikeash 10y ago
        Your access gate solution doesn't work because the impact on different drivers is dramatically unequal. If a cross-town commuter can't use that road then he might lose a minute or two of his time. If a resident can't use that road then he can't go home. Of course your hypothetical driver would choose to take the shortcut when shrouded from the knowledge that it's his road. It's a classic tragedy of the commons. Much of the purpose of traffic laws like these is to avert tragedies of the commons.
• jdblair 10y ago
  The City of Berkeley, CA, fixed this problem a long time ago, before Waze or even widespread GPS. Every few blocks they block side streets to all vehicles except bicycles. The effect is to be forced to take right or left turns that guide you back to the main through street. Streets parallel to the through streets that are now impassible to cars are marked as "bicycle boulevards" and provide safer routes for cyclists. Residents still have easy access to the main roads. It sounds like the residents of this Maryland neighborhood could adopt this practice and solve their traffic issue.
  • rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    Maryland has snow. Berkeley does not. Bikes only reduce traffic when people can ride them. Applying a Berkeley solution to a Maryland problem could only worsen congestion and quality of life.
    • jdblair 10y ago
      You misunderstand - its not the bikes that are reducing traffic, the bike access is a side-effect of the traffic calming barriers. The same barriers with no bike pass-through would be just as effective at stopping through traffic in a neighborhood. The point is to block routes through a neighborhood and force car traffic back to the main roads, stopping through traffic in a residential neighborhood.
      • thenipper 10y ago
        It'd probably make plowing a lot worse though as the plows had to cut in and out.
        • Jtsummers 10y ago
          Depending on the road layout, the plows could just be making Us through the side streets from the main avenues. Leave main, go to mandatory right/left turn, go to mandatory right/left turn, return to main. The problem with this is that east coast cities are typically not laid out on nice grids like most cities west of the Mississippi.
• hans 10y ago
  Homeownership is so overrated, not so sovereign after all..
  • Piskvorrr 10y ago
    If you want sovereignty, you are looking for Walden (or Bir Tawil), not a McSuburb.
  • ryguytilidie 10y ago
    I don't understand. Your expectation is that if you buy a home, you should be able to prohibit people from using the public street in front of it?
    • osi 10y ago
      sadly, yes, that is common. "i bought this house, it is my right to park on the street in front of it"
    • macintux 10y ago
      I think many people expect, when they buy a home on a quiet street, that the street will remain quiet indefinitely. Obviously that's not an entirely rational expectation, but it's very understandable. I grew up in an entirely enclosed (not gated, just not connected) neighborhood, where riding my bike as a young child was very safe. After I moved out, it was connected to new neighborhoods, so there is now non-local traffic. It's a fairly dramatic change for people still living there.
      • jdbernard 10y ago
        Yes. When was growing up from a relatively young age I could be gone half the day on my bike, traveling to friends' houses or nearby parks. I'm not sure I will let my children do that today because of the traffic through our current neighborhood.
• koolba 10y ago
  > Connor and his neighbors put up “No Through Traffic” signs. And their city councilman, Tim Male, tried to get Google Maps to take note of the official detour, by calling the company and flagging it through the apps’ feedback feature. Assuming the road itself is a public road (not a driveway or gated community), is there any legality to this?
  • astrodust 10y ago
    Zero.
  • Declanomous 10y ago
    If the "No Through Traffic" was approved by the local government, it would carry the same weight of law as any other traffic sign. It sounds like this is the case, since their councilman is on their side. The wording does make it sound like the neighbors had an arts and crafts party and decided to create some signs though.
    • jimktrains2 10y ago
      But if it's a road paid for with public money, how can use like this be restricted?
      • justin66 10y ago
        Toll roads are also a thing. The horror... The horror.
        • jimktrains2 10y ago
          I don't get your comment. Yes they are. Often they're not federal interstate highways. Alternatively, there are private roads, paid for by the home owners, and usage can be restricted. Can you please stop trying to be witty and express yourself coherently?
          • justin66 10y ago
• osi 10y ago
  If a route is more efficient, but people don't want it to be, the solution is traffic calming, not hiding the right of way from maps.
  • breischl 10y ago
    Yes, but traffic calming usually involves some or all of: planning studies, committee meetings, community outreach, and voting, and building & maintaining physical infrastructure. Changing the app to just not route through there is far cheaper, easier, and faster.
    • Piskvorrr 10y ago
      Easier, you say? Now someone has to curate the list of "forbidden streets," someone has to keep track of who's allowed to request additions/removals, you obviously need to add that into the algorithms somehow, etc. So, you're not actually solving anything: you're just passing the buck, pushing the traffic planners' job to Waze. And guess what: there isn't One Waze To Rule Them All - push a blocklist hard enough, and other apps, routing from other sources, will become popular. And suddenly you're playing the usual Internet Censorship Whack-A-Mole game, trying to find and coerce all the apps that are unwilling to implement your Traffic Calming Blacklist.
      • breischl 10y ago
        Spoken like someone who has never witnessed the process of changing streetscapes. There's a project on another street near me to do some traffic calming along a ~10 block stretch. It's actually a relatively small project - they're going to move the existing street parking out next to traffic, move the existing bike lane next to the curb, and make a few minor pedestrian & signage improvements. That effort has been going on for literally years, has taken time from dozens (maybe hundreds) of people, and will probably cost a 6 or 7 figure amount of money. That kind of investment makes sense when you're dealing with a long-term, ongoing problem. When it's a two-week problem due to construction, it's completely ridiculous. Software is many orders of magnitude easier to change than the physical world.
• Splines 10y ago
  > And their city councilman, Tim Male, tried to get Google Maps to take note of the official detour, by calling the company and flagging it through the apps’ feedback feature. Both Google Maps and Waze have ways (ha!) of editing the routes available in the map. A street I used to commute through suffered from the non-local traffic problem and the city erected "No thru traffic" signs. I updated both gmaps and waze to no longer me through there, it took probably about 30 min for both. Oddly enough editing maps in gmaps was disabled for around a year (some time in 2014 to some time in 2015?). But I think it should be turned back on now.
• PaulHoule 10y ago
  Ithaca had this problem arise spontaneously about a decade ago. If you're driving to the Wegmans supermarket from east of town, the official routes you are supposed to use are badly congested, and drivers "in the know" have long been aware you can save a few minutes sitting in traffic by going through a certain residential neighborhood. When they put traffic calming in place and made it illegal to drive through the neighborhood, congestion immediately got worse on the official routes. The idea that drivers benefited from less congestion was entirely left out of the public debate, especially the fact that drivers taking the shortcut reduce congestion on the major roads.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • TulliusCicero 10y ago
    If a certain route like that is overtaxed, the solution should be to either expand the road, or improve other options (likely transit), not just accept tons of through traffic in residential neighborhoods.
  • joncp 10y ago
    I wish I had a route to a local Wegmans, congested or not.
• sandworm101 10y ago
  >>> Tim Connor stands by a sign his neighbor purchased to thwart commuters from cutting through their quiet residential street in Takoma Park, Md. So who here is the one really flouting the law? You are not allowed to simply erect traffic signs, nor are you allowed to restrict access to a neighbourhood. So it's no surprise that this guy then goes rogue on the app, a presumed violation of the eula/tos agreements.
  • djrogers 10y ago
    That's more than a bit of a straw man there - the article never accused any of the drivers or the app companies of 'flouting the law'.
    • sandworm101 10y ago
      It accuses them of being focused on their cellphones, with the implication that this is impacting their driving. That's generally a traffic offence, either distracted driving or cellphone use depending on the local laws.
• jbmorgado 10y ago
  Perhaps we could be more positive and instead of spending so much time trying to get his street off Waze instead help change the public opinion and city official to improve the public transit system or get more people to use bicycles, or both.
  • jrockway 10y ago
    No doubt the subject of this article drives a car to work, probably annoying someone with the traffic he is a part of. "You're not stuck in traffic, you are traffic." A more realistic way of solving the traffic problem is not to get people out of their cars (that is going to be super-expensive), but the eliminate rush hours where everyone goes to work at the same time. "No income tax if you work from 12-8," or something would probably kill traffic dead.
    • rplst8 10y ago
      While it's true that distributing the load over more hours will improve things in the short term, the fact is, with continuous growth, eventually the roads/routes need some improving. The simple fact is that in most cities, the road infrastructure is just not up to the task for the number of people using it, and projects rarely seem to include the future requirements of the roads based on growth. The other part of the problem, as I see it, is that the solution is almost always more lanes, rather than a highway that parallels the original a few miles to the left or right of the original route. More routes have the benefit of not bringing all traffic to a halt when one has an accident.
    • bbarn 10y ago
      That's nice to think, but the reality of most business is it works with other business. They need to be roughly on the same schedule in general for that to work. You'll note that B to C business employees often work those staggered hours - so that the other consumers can get there off business hours.
• danra 10y ago
  I simply hate it when Waze navigates me through a dozen small streets I'm not familiar with, just to save one minute vs. taking a main road. The multiple suggested routes often don't mitigate this enough. Wish for a feature to turn a preference for main roads in general.
  • osi 10y ago
    or, the overall improvement for a "shortcut" needs to be a reasonable percentage of the time spent on a trip.
  • tbyehl 10y ago
    IME, Waze's journeys down non-primary roads probably aren't making my driving experience less frustrating and probably don't save any time. Invariably it sends me down a series of side streets with stops signs and dumps me back at a busy primary road where I have to make a left across traffic without the aid of a signal. If I was "up" any time by then I'll probably give it all back and then some waiting to make that final turn of Wave's goofy detour.
    • danielweber 10y ago
      "Left turn onto main thoroughfare with no signal." I've encountered this twice from Google Maps. I wouldn't want this even if it was saving me a few minutes.
      • ThrustVectoring 10y ago
        Even a right onto a main thoroughfare isn't worth saving a few minutes. Re-joining the main flow of traffic is stressful and dangerous.
    • RichardCA 10y ago
      To me this is the heart of the matter. Waze knows people dislike this but they can't seem to find a way to place that behavior under the user's control. Most of us would be happy to stick to "arterial" streets even if it costs us a few more minutes of drive time.
• sehugg 10y ago
  At least in Takoma Park's case, these are decisions made 50 years ago coming home to roost -- that is, the decision not to build any highways through northern DC.
• jackfoxy 10y ago
  Waze can have giant screw-ups. I live in a valley with one major freeway. Every now and then a major accident at a choke point on the freeway will stop all traffic. Waze will then tell drivers of 2 alternate routes on surface streets. Both routes, however, re-connect to the freeway below this choke point. Now instead of just the freeway having gridlock, every thoroughfare in the valley is gridlocked and locals cannot even get out of their house or back to their house from local shopping.
• warcher 10y ago
  I have gotten in not one, but several, extremely heated discussions over the years after parking on a public street in front of somebody's house. I'm not a big defender of, say, Airbnb running gypsy hotels in secret defiance of leasing and HOA agreements, but people have a lot of funny ideas about ownership of things that aren't theirs to own.
  • enjo 10y ago
    It seems to me that you see this problem mostly in suburbs. People didn't buy a house, they bought a lifestyle. A particular lifestyle that has no room for even the slightest inconvenience from others. During my suburban days I was always sort of amazed by the entitlement people had around me. I saw near fistfights over people parking in front of other peoples houses. Or a particularly memorable argument in which people shouted out of their kitchen window at a group of kids who were doing nothing but sitting on a deck talking at 8:00 PM. My HOA sued the town I lived in because someone wanted to build an apartment building about 1/4 mile from the front entrance of the subdivision (don't want "those" people living nearby after all). The HOA also was part of a larger group opposing the extension of a light rail line that would connect our town to the larger metroplex. The same argument was used in that case, "those people" would be able to come up and cause crime in our neighborhood. I'm not surprised that the people in the article believe that they have a right to a quiet street.
    • awm 10y ago
      I've noticed though that the perspective matters. If somebody start complaining about how I parked in front of their house, a typical response is: "I can't believe how annoyed this guy is getting over me just parking here for 15 minutes." The homeowner however doesn't care that its only 15 minutes of your time, since for him/her its probably all day :-/
      • enjo 10y ago
        But it's not their parking spot to get mad over.
    • 10y ago
• iambyteman 10y ago
  Seems like Waze should probably try to send thru traffic down double-yellow-line roads. Those roads are typically better able to handle the traffic at least where I live (in Baltimore). Sending folks down a single lane (but not technically one way) street is nuts and doesn't really save much time.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    those roads typically have higher speed limits and will be faster routes -- until they are clogged with traffic. Which is when Waze (and, for that matter, Google Maps, and any other traffic-aware routing system) will use alternative routes which are slower in the ideal case, but faster with the actual current traffic loads. There's ways to avoid this: (1) Design residential districts so that through traffic is impossible. (Lots of places do this, by having branching patterns rather than grids; this, of course, also makes it more possible for accidents, etc., to prevent ingress/egress.) (2) Provide capacity on arterial roads so that they don't jam up and leave residential roads as faster through routes. (3) Improve public transport capacity so that the existing capacity of arterial roads is sufficient. Long before Waze and similar systems, people who frequently drove in an area would learn over time the alternate routes (including those through residential neighborhoods) that provided better times when main routes clogged up and use them freely. Technology just makes it so that information is more rapidly acquired by commuters. Its irrational, however, to expect commuters that have that information, whether through trial-and-error born of frustration (and then spread through word of mouth) or through modern technology to not use it.
• brooklyndavs 10y ago
  While I have sympathy for homeowners in this case I have none for the local politicians that are complaining about it. As a Waze and Google Maps user if there is a faster route down a side street vs the interstate I'm of course going to take it. I'll follow all the laws of that side street naturally (25 mph zone for example) but I still have every right to drive down it if its a public street that is maintained by public taxes. With that said, if these local politicians really cared about fixed the problem vs just complaining about traffic they would work within their region to fix the root problems of traffic. Provide alternate transportation options including bike lanes, trains, buses, etc. Stop building office parks out in the middle of nowhere. Start building dense, walk-able, AFFORDABLE neighborhoods close to jobs and services. Encourage local business to have people telecommute or work alternate hours.
• cgtyoder 10y ago
  Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844246
• ucaetano 10y ago
  The american dream is everyone having their own cul de sac :)
• CPLX 10y ago
  I think those of us who live in the central business districts of major urban ares should organize a once a month event to take 500-1000 cars to a specific suburban neighborhood, where we will take up all the legal on street parking and cause a traffic jam, to prove a minor but important point.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• joehewitt 10y ago
  On Memorial Day I walked outside and did a double take - my quiet street, tucked away many turns from any main road, was backed up with cars from end to end. I'd never seen that before in 5 years here. Turned out it was Waze sending beachgoers (I'm still 30 minutes from the beach) on a side route to the nearest on ramp for the highway that heads to the coast. Within an hour there was a police car here diverting drivers and the town put up cones to stop it. What's frustrating is this "shortcut" was completely ineffective. It simply moved the traffic jam from the main roads to our tiny neighborhood.
  • gerbilly 10y ago
    >What's frustrating is this "shortcut" was completely ineffective. It simply moved the traffic jam from the main roads to our tiny neighborhood. This exemplifies the arrogance of 'disruptive companies' when they think they can improve on something like a traffic system or a taxi system. They set out to make things more efficient without a deep understanding of the problem. They see every problem as a technical optimization problem because they learned this kind of thing at school. However society has usually evolved a set of rules balancing the rights of various parties already.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
• yAak 10y ago
  Google Maps is routing me down these 1-lane residential roads, too, and I'd generally rather it didn't. These 1-lane roads are already a headache for those living there, with cars parked on both sides, making dealing with ANY traffic a pain. Traffic is terrible where I live, but I'd rather spend another 1-5 minutes on a major thoroughfare than drive through someone's neighborhood. I don't live on a street that has this problem (it's a dead end) but we have our own parking disaster unrelated to thru traffic, so maybe its easier for me to empathize with these homeowners about something that they have almost no control over and lowers quality of life.
  • massysett 10y ago
    Google Maps is doing this to me in Washington DC. I probably wouldn't mind if it actually saved time. The problem is that drivers before me tried it, so the city has made many of the streets one way during rush hour only, or particular turns are banned. Google should program in more of these details before it routes people down what its maps already know are tiny, non-through streets. Usually I consult Google for traffic but when it picks these circuitous routes I ignore it because I can't trust it. In the same vein sometimes it is worth it to stay on a main road even if a perfectly valid side route would save just a few minutes. Driving the side route can be less safe, more stressful, and it's easier to miss a turn, which wipes out the savings anyway. I wish the map software would account for this.
  • danielweber 10y ago
    I've been put through neighborhoods far from me a few times, and I've always been thinking "is this really worth it? Am I making my life better by enough to justify this?"
  • chrisdbaldwin 10y ago
    Google/Alphabet purchased Waze at some point, and they use Waze's tech in Google Maps.
  • ghaff 10y ago
    Every now and then Google Maps seems determined to take a scenic drive through the country which often ends up taking longer because the weather is bad or I make a wrong turn. I had a new one the other day though when Google Maps took me through an office park prominently sign-posted as private property to avoid the regular traffic backup at a particular traffic light. I can't imagine having an issue as a one-pff thing but I probably wouldn't want to make a practice of it.
• Overtonwindow 10y ago
  Waze is providing a solution for poorly constructed and ignored infrastructure. I am a homeowner and a Waze user. I think if you have a problem with traffic through your neighborhood, blame the city Council, and push them to action. Don't blame the solution to bad infrastructure.
• JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  I'm actually torn on this. If the city, county, etc. maintains a street as "public", then it's fair game. However, I know there are jerkarses in the world and would treat residential streets as their personal race track. If people are getting agitated and honking and there's traffic jams, that puts residents in danger.
  • jdbernard 10y ago
    Yeah, me too. I'm not a Waze user, but I've lived in my area long enough to be familiar with a lot of the neighborhood roads. My personal solution is to only take side streets when the traffic on them is light enough that I'm not making it worse, and to be extra cautious as I do so. Not really a scalable solution though.
• neves 10y ago
  Here in my third world country, I know people who live near dangerous areas that love the traffic increase that Waze created. Sure it there is a little more noise, but they also fell more secure. Maybe it is just a different point of view.
  • 6stringmerc 10y ago
    That is interesting to hear, I think you're right it's a different point of view. Thanks for sharing.
  • CodeCube 10y ago
    Interesting, are you saying that the increased traffic is welcome because there are now more people around to dissuade crime from occurring?
    • neves 10y ago
      Yes
• tggrass 10y ago
  The levels of arrogant suburban privilege in this article are staggering.
• gooseus 10y ago
  As a Waze user, this has actually been a source of increasing frustration for me. I do not want to save 1-3 minutes on a commute by cutting through unfamiliar residential areas where deaf kids play and homeowners give me dirty looks as I go over their oversized speed bumps. I use Waze not so much as a super-optimal routing tool, but as an aggravation-avoidance tool. Traffic and speed-traps aggravate me, sure... but not nearly so much as trying to make a blind left from a stop sign at the top of a hill in my manual transmission. Just yesterday I was in a somewhat unfamiliar area during crazy rainstorms near NYC... I used Waze since who knows what traffic looks like in those conditions. In order to avoid 20-30 seconds of waiting at a traffic light it routed me to the next street over to make the left turn... which was on a curve with lots of parked cars and, in that weather, made it impossible to see if anyone was coming. If it hadn't been a one-way street I'd have considered turning around and going back to the light... but instead I used my best judgement and BARELY avoided getting nailed by another car. Waze is great technology, but is still pretty naive about solving the problem I want solved. All the aggregated minutes of driving it has saved me over the last couple years would not have been worth it if yesterday's single poor routing decision had ended with me in the hospital/dead and/or my car totaled. </rant>
  • mankyd 10y ago
    Indeed. I have the same issue. I want to avoid major traffic and construction, not _all_ traffic in construction. In Boston, where I live, the side streets are often narrow, one way, and labyrinthine. A lot of times, I'd rather just drive the extra minute through the traffic light rather than zig-zag around it.
  • ciconia 10y ago
    I actually decided to stop using Waze for that reason. It felt like its routing algorithm is way too aggressive and would take me on shortcuts through smaller streets, just to shave off a minute or two. This in turn would require being much more attentive, since you need to make a turn much more often. I absolutely hated it.
    • socalnate1 10y ago
• Spooky23 10y ago
  I have to agree with the homeowners here. This isn't a NIMBY issue. Google in particular has the data to know what streets are primary routes and what streets are not. Road design and traffic engineering are engineering problems, and shunting high volumes of traffic at roads not engineered appropriately is a bad thing. By doing this, Waze is creating situations where adequate flow controls (traffic lights, lane markings, crosswalks, signage) are not present and create serious safety problems. If someone I cared about was injured in this type of situation, I would sue Google, because they have the data to know this is wrong.
  • golergka 10y ago
    The only thing Waze is doing is giving people information and suggestions. It does not control drivers. And if your traffic system requires drivers to not know information that by all means is public knowledge to work — it's one bad system.
    • Spooky23 10y ago
      If you give advice for a living, you have a responsibility to provide the best advice possible.
• edward 10y ago
  Tragedy of the commons. Waze could let people pay drivers to not use their road. The price can be determined by the market. Start at $0.50, only valid once per day in each direction.
  • matt-attack 10y ago
    Yes, some time ago, I had postulated this would happen. I see it as a new form of revenue for Waze.
  • KON_Air 10y ago
    Only 0.5$ foreach direction daily! What is this? Communism?
  • chongli 10y ago
    Why should the locals have to pay? What we need is a system of license-plate-reading cameras with automated ticketing to bring up the enforcement of No Thru Traffic signs to near 100%. Then, if Waze routed a hundred cars through a neighbourhood they'd all end up paying $100 fines, bringing in a big stream of revenue to the city and discouraging the use of the app. Perhaps even more practical would be a law to allow the residents themselves to set up and maintain the system in exchange for a cut of the ticket revenue for their neighbourhood!
  • golergka 10y ago
    It's called "private roads" and existed for centuries, I think.
• S_A_P 10y ago
  If it were me, I would never live on a "busy" street. I dont know that you can put the genie back in the bottle here. I dont use WAZE, but I do use my navigation system in a similar fashion if I notice a build up of traffic. There are too many navigational tools that can direct you around traffic.
• Tokkemon 10y ago
  Remember the old days when one actually had to figure out directions for themselves by looking at a map?
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• intrasight 10y ago
  I don't like the term "war". I think this is a valid process of crowdsourced information and neighborhoods then working the political process to put up "soft" barriers to change that information. And on the plus side for the neighborhoods, it forces neighbors to meet and hopefully get to know each other as they try to exert a crowdsourced counterforce.
• bgok 10y ago
  A friend laughed at me once when I said I felt bad about cutting through neighborhood streets when waze routed me that way.
• donatj 10y ago
  I think there entire thing is looked at backwards by city planers. Instead of having one major road you force everyone on to, make all the side streets viable. Parallel works great when you can't speed up the serial speeds.
• olentangy 10y ago
  I want Waze to add new features: 1. Crowd source bad roads. Some interstates are atrocious, I'd happily turn on [X] avoid potholes and uneven pavement. Maybe use the motion sensors to do this automatically. 2. Get me know altitude. This would made planning trips through the mountains way better - avoiding high mountain passes would be very helpful. 3. Overlay radar when thunderstorms are hopscotching across the land.
• dghughes 10y ago
  In a way I know how he feels. A portable speed bump was placed on a parallel road to where I live and traffic avoids it as if it were a pack of zombies.
• ThomaszKrueger 10y ago
  In Rio some tourists had a pretty harsh reception when they made a turn suggested by Waze.. got riddled with bullets. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/10/05/how-directions-on-the-waze-app-led-to-death-in-brazils-favelas/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/10/05...
• mathattack 10y ago
  One thing that Waze misses (perhaps in the interest of simplicity?) is nudges. As in, "I prefer highways" and "I prefer no speedbumps". I don't know a clean way to map it against time (Don't go residential unless you save me 10 mins) but this could be a start. I like Waze for helping me survive Bay Area traffic. If there's an accident, I do like the roundabout directions.
  • golergka 10y ago
    It has "routing styles", "avoid toll roads" and "avoid freeways" in settings — sounds close enough.
• Shivetya 10y ago
  want them out of residential, speed humps are wonderful, not the little curb like bumps, I am talking the flat top type that you ride and down on. been done in a few areas where I live when people started shortcutting on streets that were home to influential people. much more difficult to get into simple subdivisions though
• dkhenry 10y ago
  Yes what we should do is complain that people are starting to use side streets because no one plans on increased traffic when developers and homeowners are building mega suburbs. If you want sub-urban sprawl, but don't want to invest in infrastructure then your street should be over run with commuters.
  • enoch_r 10y ago
    One of the examples in the article is Clinton St, a designated "bike boulevard" in a dense residential neighborhood of Portland, 1-2 blocks south of one of the bigger, cooler commercial streets in the city. This is not a case of suburbanites suffering for their sins in some morality play--some of the best bike infrastructure in the city is what's being overrun by commuters. Neither the people living along Clinton, nor the bicyclists who were incredibly unhappy to lose a low-stress route through the city, are looking to maintain a suburban lifestyle.
• epalmer 10y ago
  I turn off the navigation. I know how to get to work and home. What I want to know is where the accidents are, something in the road, car stopped on the side of the road. things like that. I make navigation choices once presented with these options.
• snowake 10y ago
  This is a delicate and complicated issue, to be sure. It's got a bit of a NIMBY flavor to it - at least, personally. Like many other Waze users below, I benefit greatly from the alternatives the app presents - and have been expert at quickly switching to the 'routes' view to see JUST how much time that detour is going to save me. With the heavily congested Bay Area freeways, our 35 minute drive can easily take well over an hour (the 'regular' way) and Waze consistently trims it down to under 50 minutes, door-to-door. All of that said - if there was a sudden influx of 'through' traffic on my quiet, residential street, where my child plays - I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like it. Of course, no matter WHAT route we're taking, every driver is expected to travel within the legal speed limit and remain fully aware of surroundings... right?? I know, I know. There's no doubt that this is a technology that's here to stay - and I applaud enhancements like highlighting schools, hospitals or other "slow zones" (they could even become optional 'areas to avoid'). With more and more autonomy and connectivity being built into vehicles (which disturbs me due to security implications), I imagine it won't be long until this functionality gets (at least optionally) embedded in the vehicle. Perhaps a self-drive car, aware of its surroundings, wouldn't hit the plastic "Slow - Children at Play" sign. :)
• blisterpeanuts 10y ago
  The newer neighborhoods in Phoenix are designed on purpose to prevent this type of cut-through traffic. The northern Glendale area where my house is has luxuriously broad thoroughfares with three lanes in each direction, plus usually an extra right turn lane and left turn lane at intersections, plus a median that accommodates incidental left turns without interrupting traffic flow. From a driving point of view, these roads are virtually perfect. But the minute you enter the neighborhoods, which tend to have walls between the houses and the main roads to keep down the noise, the roads become curly-cue winding paths with T-intersections and dead ends all over the place. The point is, you can easily get to your house, and you can easily get to various outlets to a major road or to the minor "partial cut-throughs" that are really only useful to the residents. But few will use the neighborhoods as cut-throughs. I would suppose Waze is not of much value in this type of district, except maybe to warn you to reroute from one major road to the other. Maybe the residents of these cut-through neighborhoods alluded to in the article should introduce more speed bumps and stop signs to "calm" the traffic and make their roads less desirable alternatives. In some cases, creating one-ways is also useful if it doesn't inconvenience the residents too much. Parking on the street, if legal, would also impede traffic, forcing people to cross lanes or wait. It would also help to have the main thoroughfares be properly widened and maintained as in the Phoenix example, don't allow major road and sewage maintenance during rush hour, etc.
• vermontdevil 10y ago
  Not all roads are created equal. Residential roads have different maintenance and capacity than main roads. If traffic increases due to shortcut traffic, towns will have to increase budgets to accommodate more wear and tear upkeep.
• rwhitman 10y ago
  It's fascinating to witness this byproduct of the ubiquity of Google Maps / Waze as it begins introducing traffic jams of it's own creation. So many people are directed to alternate routes en masse that Google has the power to direct the flow of traffic. This is one of those AI-run-amok problems that everyone has been so worried about. A Google robot is algorithmically directing our traffic now, no self-driving cars necessary. A bot potentially throwing an enormous monkey wrench in billions of dollars worth of traffic planning done by city engineers all over the world. Going to be interesting to see how all this shakes out
• yellowapple 10y ago
  > For one thing, the system knows if you’re not actually in motion. More important, it constantly self-corrects, based on data from other drivers. > “The nature of crowdsourcing is that if you put in a fake accident, the next 10 people are going to report that it’s not there,” said Julie Mossler, Waze’s head of communications. This sounds like something solvable with a farm of Android VMs and fake location data. Get an estimate of how many cars are cutting through the neighborhood, spin up enough VMs to out-vote them, feed Waze fake location data (pretty sure you can do this through developer options, though I don't know if Android supports spoofed motion specifically), and simulate an accident or some other blockage. On an unrelated note, if you're stuck in traffic, wouldn't there still be a lack of motion? That seems like a weird sanity check. It's probably an oversimplified description of what's actually being detected against (stop-and-go versus just standing there), but it sounds like even this check could be defeated with an ordinary GPS-enabled smartphone and a bicycle.
  • brbsix 10y ago
    I assume Waze is monitoring the entire duration of your travel (while you have it on at least). It should be fairly easy to identify users who stay within the 0.25mi radius of one neighborhood and/or never exceed 20mph. There is an 'Allow mock locations' toggle in developer options, though applications can detect that it's been enabled. Xposed framework can prevent that however. Perhaps some community will start a crowdsource fund to hire a developer to implement such a system? Or go low-tech and crowdsource real users, paying $n per false report. They could also take a page from the residents of Beachwood Canyon (near the Hollywood sign in LA) who petitioned their council member to arrange a deal with Garmin and Google Maps. http://gizmodo.com/why-people-keep-trying-to-erase-the-hollywood-sign-from-1658084644 http://gizmodo.com/why-people-keep-trying-to-erase-the-holly...
• mback00 10y ago
  The problem here is not the app. People need to understand that the road /is/ public! Your neighborhood does /not/ own the road - everyone does. IMO, The solution to the problem of conjestion is opening of carpool lanes to all travelers, aggressive clearing accidents, creation of visual barriers (blinds) to accidents, and above all global acceptance of driverless systems.
  • poolbath1 10y ago
    The next thing we need to do is change the language of the road to "incidents" instead of "accidents". An accident implies that there is no way to avoid the outcome of an incident. An incident implies that a traffic collision has occurred. Once we rule out human error or any other cause for the incident, then it becomes an accident. We will find that many of the traffic collisions that we are currently referring to as accidents could have been prevented in many ways: - remove vast amounts of human error by automating driving and being much more strict for driving infractions (Inattention, reckless driving, DUI) - infrastructure that encourages speeding / leaves no options for pedestrians or cyclists causing incident hotspots. This will allow us to focus on the safety issues that really are accidents, and usually caused by poor maintenance on vehicles and infrastructure.
• dclowd9901 10y ago
  “In some extreme cases, we have to address it to preserve the sanctity of a residential neighborhood.” Bull fucking shit. This nimby crap has got to stop. This is a public road. If you were smart you'd buy the road and put a toll on it.
• brbsix 10y ago
  I really wish Google Maps wouldn't be pushing these reroutes by default. A friend was pulled over a few days ago in a small town off the Interstate (the sort of place with bored LE) and got embroiled in all sorts of legal nonsense thanks to this "feature". There's only one obvious route (and I know it well), so I couldn't figure out how she was "caught up" in the aforementioned city. She said Google Maps had redirected her off the Interstate and that she had spent 40 minutes driving back roads. I didn't believe her. The next day I was driving as she played navigator with her phone. It was a highway route that I know well. Several times it redirected us around "slowdowns" and (what it referred to as) construction. Out of curiosity due to the prior events, I begrudgingly obliged it's instructions. It was completely nonsensical... Not only did it not save time, but it added a whole new dimension of additional stress driving through unfamiliar, unsigned, back roads. I don't know that I feel comfortable using or recommending the current incarnation of Google Maps navigation to others. It's great and all when you already know exactly where and how you're going someplace. The traffic estimates can be invaluable. However until they scale back this rerouting business, I'd be really weary of using it any further. There are plenty of decent "dumb" navigation apps that won't fuck you like this.
• gerbilly 10y ago
  I don't understand why so much of this thread is caught up on issues of what is legal, and what isn't, often citing that nobody 'owns' the street. Isn't it a matter of being considerate? Everybody knows that most rules in a society are implicit and unwritten. To insist on only obeying the laws that are written in the most selfish way possible is to be intentionally, self-servingly, naïve. We aren't robots, we are people. We live in a society, not a scenario out of a game theory textbook.
• ablation 10y ago
  “We had traffic jams, people were honking. It was pretty harrowing.” "Harrowing"?! Man, I hope this guy never has to experience anything actually bad happen in his life.
• killface 10y ago
  Lol, now these assholes also own the streets and traffic patterns around their houses. Good to know.