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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 wi
by 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 agoI 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 agoDon't things like that usually have signs?
- zyxley 10y agoI'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 agoIn 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 agoI 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 agoThere 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 agoI'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 agoThere'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 agoHow do you know there's no way? At the very least, it might be paying for itself....
- aggie 10y agoThe marginal cost of those items, for the police anyway, might be close to 0.
- superuser2 10y agoSuburban 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 agoThe 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 agoIn 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 agoA 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 agoEven 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 agoAlas if they'd only left out the word "militia"...
- protomyth 10y agoMilitia had a specific meaning to the founders. Alas, if people today would study what the words they used actually meant.
- knieveltech 10y agoConversely, 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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agoHere (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 agoI 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 agoSo 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 agoTraffic calming hurts emergency service response. Ambulances have to slow down to a crawl thru this "calming." Buyer beware.
- Kluny 10y agoIt's still easier to get through calming than it is to get through a street jammed with traffic.
- FroshKiller 10y agoI 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 agoSpeed bumps are smoother if taken at speed. Now, speed humps will send ya flying.
- ipsi 10y agoI 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 agoWhere 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 agoI 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 agoOne 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 agoOne 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 agoI 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 agoI'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 agoPalo 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 agoWe 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 agoI 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 agoSuppose 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 agoYes, 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 agoSo, 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 agoBy that argument, would you have an objection to me operating a horse carriage on a freeway?
- niccaluim 10y agoIt'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 agoThe 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 agoI 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 ago100% 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 agoYou 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 agoThe 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 agoThere 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 agoIt'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 agoI 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 agoThat escalation from stop signs to funding terrorists was entertaining to say the least
- AnthonyMouse 10y agoPretty 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 agoAs 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 agoSo 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 agoRoads 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 agoThe 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 agoIn 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 agoSo, exercising the right to use a public street within the bounds of the law is considered entitlement?
- Justsignedup 10y agoSpeed 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 agoSpeed 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 agoThanks 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 agoSpeed 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 agoIt'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 agoYep, 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 agoAnd 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...