8 ms·

Waze Hijacked L.A. in the Name of Convenience

38 points by overwhelm 7y ago

scarejunba 7y ago
Everyone wants to drive through other people's streets and wants no one to drive on theirs. Waze made it so this was evenly distributed. Of course the erstwhile privileged fear loss of privilege.
- nullc 7y ago
  This isn't a fair read on the situation, the tension isn't between my streets and your streets, it's between major arterials and light residential streets. In many cases the arterials don't have anyone directly on them (or only commercial/industrial property)... specifically as part of their intended purpose. In fact, if the situation isn't addressed in a fair and intentional manner a my vs your issue will be created: wealthier residents will erect gates, block traffic, privatize roads, or move to other locations ... and leave everyone else to contend with the mess on their own access roads, without the political air cover of wealthier people also suffering the same roadway misuse problem.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    They cannot privatize by California law unless there is no current or prospective public use. Existing roads will remain. They can build new roads and keep them private. So be it. This is a trade-off I am willing to accept. The navigation apps have no incentive to give you a worse experience by sending you down narrow roads.
koboll 7y ago
>This has created fascinating potential legal issues that may one day be litigated in lawsuits or class actions. These thousands of homeowners and renters have arguably been injured by Waze’s and Google’s successful privatization of formerly public streets. So it's illegal to tell people that a public road might make for a faster route than the one a person is currently driving on? It seems like the real problem here is shitty urban planning. This is clearly a huge problem plaguing Los Angeles, in many ways beyond just this one. If you want to keep people off streets, pass ordnances that say non-residents can't cut through them. Otherwise, there's not much of a case against Waze here.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  > So it's illegal to tell people that a public road might make for a faster route than the one a person is currently driving on? If doing so is encouraging reckless driving and causing public endangerment of the residents on the streets, why shouldn't it be? They're clearly contributing to a loss of safety. Especially consider that the kind of person who is willing to shave off 30 seconds a commute by cutting through a neighborhood is unlikely to be the kind of person who would travel the appropriate speed on said street without a cop and radar gun verifying it.
  - koboll 7y ago
    I fail to understand how merely directing people toward a certain street amounts to encouraging reckless driving.
    - jcranmer 7y ago
      For one thing, Waze is using the actual speed of drivers instead of the legal speed limit to determine the travel time of a route. If drivers are speeding, Waze is basing its time savings on drivers violating the law. In some of the conditions that are brought up in these stories, it's not even really safe to travel the legal speed limit. (And reckless driving includes travelling too fast for conditions). Given the resistance of Waze to merely cut out those routes that are not safe for through traffic, it's clear that they do not value safety and I hold little sympathy for them.
      - Mtinie 7y ago
        Are you sure about that, if the speed is moving greater than the posted limit? Waze displays your current speed as a green/red value compared against the posted speed. I can’t imagine they’d use absolute herd speed as the baseline against the projected speeds of the herd’s speed was a greater value.
      - solveit 7y ago
        I strenuously object to the idea that the government should be able to stop the spreading of publicly available truths in the name of public safety, especially over a justification as flimsy as "encourages reckless driving". I would be willing to revisit this debate when somebody figures out how to build nuclear weapons in their garage, not so much before that.
nostromo 7y ago
> No street, certainly not your residential 25-mph variety, is safe from being Wazed into a makeshift freeway or thoroughfare. ... These thousands of homeowners and renters have arguably been injured by Waze’s and Google’s successful privatization of formerly public streets. This is exactly backwards. The streets were effectively privatized before, via obscurity. It is Waze that has made formerly private streets public.
- wcarron 7y ago
  That's complete BS. The roads have always been there, fulfilling their designated purpose; which is to handle the small amount of traffic the neighborhood residents generate in a safe manner. They were never meant to handle massive amounts of traffic, which actually does damage property values when potential buyers are scared off by unsafe streets.
  - cma 7y ago
    All of that can be true and it can still have made them public. Isn't that the whole problem?
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    Your property value isn't my problem. I have a right to that street that is no less than yours.
    - Doxin 7y ago
      Sure, But people have a right to not unexpectedly live next to a highway as well. There's a balance here that needs to be struck and that balance is not doing whatever you like with disregard of if that bothers anyone else.
      - prepend 7y ago
        Not if they live next to a public road. As long as folks follow the speed limit there’s nothing you should do. I mapped out the roads around my house before buying. If you live on a shortcut public road you’ll get lots of traffic.
RhodesianHunter 7y ago
Technology is created to solve a problem. Technology has unintended consequences. Technology owners have feduciary responsibility to continue producing technology. Negatively affected citizens make a fuss, claim they deserve more rights than other citizens. Media creates hit pieces, painting the most negative possible picture in an attempt to look like investigative journalism. Government either ignores the problem, or grossly overreaches, leading to further unintended consequences.
- lidHanteyk 7y ago
  Oh nice! This is Discordian 5-act structure. Chaos: Our protagonist, New Tech, arises. Discord: As a consequence, the first antagonist looms: Unintended Consequences. Confusion: New Tech is not dissuaded. It moves boldly, embracing what it sees as positive change in the world. Bureaucracy: Unintended Consequences summons the evil power of Somebody Else's Problem, and reveals their true face: Angry Mobs. The Aftermath: The Government steps in. They ban New Tech, establish a Committee to Study Somebody Else's Problem, set up a fund for Unintended Consequences, and violently suppress the Angry Mobs. Recall that, in Discordian 5-act, the protagonist is arbitrary, and usually chosen to maximize irony, bathos, or confusion. Our goal is to remind the audience of how silly it was to think of anything or anybody as morally absolved.
PaulHoule 7y ago
I grew up in Southern Hew Hampshire, one of the sprawliest places in the U.S. The architectural principle of Southern NH is that streets are not organized in a grid but rather in a hierarchy. They add more suburban "pods" at the leaf nodes with resulting uncontrollable traffic increases at upper levels. A street grid scales in an entirely different way in that if you build more grid you add both short- and long-range access at the same time. A town I live near added "traffic calming" measures, in some cases draconian. (e.g. When the cop catches you turning towards the supermarket when you shouldn't be you tell him that you're entirely confused by the streets in the area, you blow 0.0, and he says he is confused by it too.) As soon as traffic calming went into place, traffic got much worse on nearby arteries, particularly wait times at street lights. My current theory is that a good traffic route avoids stop lights like the plague. It's inevitable that you will hit stop lights, wasting your time and fuel. If you go to places where traffic concentrates, traffic will eventually outflow the ability of cars to clear the intersection during the green cycle. So a single traffic light causes you to be stuck for several cycles. If you think for yourself you realize that you can clear 10 stop sign intersections in the time that you can clear a bad pair of lights. I don't apologize for any of this behavior because I am making life better for people in the herd by getting out of it.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
The problem isn't Waze. It's the sprawl and failure of urban planning. More dense, more mixed use development is what LA needs. Less cars implies less traffic. Make cities walkable. But, it is too late for that. Homeowners have decided carte blanche to oppose new development. This is the price they pay. LA will never return to being a city with one-tenth its current population, where every family gets a 6,000 square foot lot, a car and 2.1 kids. Plan for it.
PeterisP 7y ago
A nice quote from the article - "The mayor spoke proudly of this shining example of the city’s “data initiative,” and how the Waze partnership would “get people where they want to go, faster.”" followed by a dissatisfaction that it did not result in people getting sent to the roadways that the traffic planners wanted to. Guess what, people would absolutely get sent to the major roadways if (and only if!) those roadways would actually get people where they want to go, faster. If those roadways suck compared to the alternatives, then that points towards a duty of the major to improve those major roadways (which are obviously overwhelmed even after Waze helps by redirecting some traffic off of them), not a duty to drivers to simply suffer every day while sitting in a traffic jam on the "gov't recommended" route or the likes of Waze to keep mum about better alternatives. The article mentions the 'LA Complete Streets Official Guide' listing which streets the planners designated as arterial vs non-arterial - guess what, if there's a mismatch between the plan and how people can reach their destinations most efficiently, then it is the plan that's wrong and needs to change, not the drivers. If you plan and build a wider, "faster" arterial route that's actually a huge diversion and drivers take shortcuts instead of following your route, well, too bad you wasted a bunch of money building a road noone needs based on a bad plan, it's not the fault of drivers that this road doesn't suit their needs. The city was free to use its partnership with Waze to determine where to build(improve/widen/regulate) roads and intersections that would be a better fit for how people want to travel. However, instead of listening to the people through that data, they wanted to use it to tell people how to get where they want to be in a way that suits interests of city planners instead of the driver - and that's not how it works.
- wcarron 7y ago
  > The article mentions the 'LA Complete Streets Official Guide' listing which streets the planners designated as arterial vs non-arterial - guess what, if there's a mismatch between the plan and how people can reach their destinations most efficiently, then it is the plan that's wrong and needs to change, not the drivers. I think you are failing to differentiate between use and abuse. Roads have a specific purpose. Small, narrow side streets in dense, highly populated neighborhoods are not meant for heavy thru-traffic. Drivers using them for that purpose are, in fact, abusing them, at the expense of the people that live, walk, run, bicycle, and park in that neighborhood. In these instances, it is not that the city planners were wrong. The plan wasn't wrong. The drivers heedlessly barreling down streets never meant for that are in the wrong. > it's not the fault of drivers that this road doesn't suit their needs. You can't always get what you want. The desire to get to work 5 minutes faster doesn't overrule the right of people to have safe streets to live on. Unnecessarily diverting loads of drivers onto roads not meant to handle them is unethical.
ageitgey 7y ago
This is a well-researched traffic problem called induced demand [1] - building more roads in a congested city always makes traffic worse, not better, in the long term. Waze is giving people more roads to use, so they are in effect 'building more roads', which causes more total people to drive, which makes traffic even worse for everyone. There is no possible outcome here other than everything being worse for everyone involved, despite whatever libertarian views you might hold. Waze can only be a net loss for everyone for LA in the long term despite whatever benefits the early users got for a few years. But banning Waze is just a band-aid. The real problem is that the only way to get around LA is to drive. The real solution for LA is to re-think itself as a walkable about city with real public transit options. There isn't enough physical space for everyone in LA to get to where they want to go in a giant, personal automobile while still leaving room for dense housing. If you are interested in exactly how to redesign a city to make all transit more effective, check out the book 'Walkable City Rules' by Jeff Speck. [1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/09/citylab-university-induced-demand/569455/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/09/citylab-unive...

38 points by overwhelm 7y ago

Everyone wants to drive through other people's streets and wants no one to drive on theirs. Waze made it so this was evenly distributed. Of course the erstwhile privileged fear loss of privilege.

nullc 7y ago
This isn't a fair read on the situation, the tension isn't between my streets and your streets, it's between major arterials and light residential streets. In many cases the arterials don't have anyone directly on them (or only commercial/industrial property)... specifically as part of their intended purpose. In fact, if the situation isn't addressed in a fair and intentional manner a my vs your issue will be created: wealthier residents will erect gates, block traffic, privatize roads, or move to other locations ... and leave everyone else to contend with the mess on their own access roads, without the political air cover of wealthier people also suffering the same roadway misuse problem.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  They cannot privatize by California law unless there is no current or prospective public use. Existing roads will remain. They can build new roads and keep them private. So be it. This is a trade-off I am willing to accept. The navigation apps have no incentive to give you a worse experience by sending you down narrow roads.

koboll 7y ago

>This has created fascinating potential legal issues that may one day be litigated in lawsuits or class actions. These thousands of homeowners and renters have arguably been injured by Waze’s and Google’s successful privatization of formerly public streets. So it's illegal to tell people that a public road might make for a faster route than the one a person is currently driving on? It seems like the real problem here is shitty urban planning. This is clearly a huge problem plaguing Los Angeles, in many ways beyond just this one. If you want to keep people off streets, pass ordnances that say non-residents can't cut through them. Otherwise, there's not much of a case against Waze here.

jcranmer 7y ago
> So it's illegal to tell people that a public road might make for a faster route than the one a person is currently driving on? If doing so is encouraging reckless driving and causing public endangerment of the residents on the streets, why shouldn't it be? They're clearly contributing to a loss of safety. Especially consider that the kind of person who is willing to shave off 30 seconds a commute by cutting through a neighborhood is unlikely to be the kind of person who would travel the appropriate speed on said street without a cop and radar gun verifying it.
- koboll 7y ago
  I fail to understand how merely directing people toward a certain street amounts to encouraging reckless driving.
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    For one thing, Waze is using the actual speed of drivers instead of the legal speed limit to determine the travel time of a route. If drivers are speeding, Waze is basing its time savings on drivers violating the law. In some of the conditions that are brought up in these stories, it's not even really safe to travel the legal speed limit. (And reckless driving includes travelling too fast for conditions). Given the resistance of Waze to merely cut out those routes that are not safe for through traffic, it's clear that they do not value safety and I hold little sympathy for them.
    - Mtinie 7y ago
      Are you sure about that, if the speed is moving greater than the posted limit? Waze displays your current speed as a green/red value compared against the posted speed. I can’t imagine they’d use absolute herd speed as the baseline against the projected speeds of the herd’s speed was a greater value.
    - solveit 7y ago
      I strenuously object to the idea that the government should be able to stop the spreading of publicly available truths in the name of public safety, especially over a justification as flimsy as "encourages reckless driving". I would be willing to revisit this debate when somebody figures out how to build nuclear weapons in their garage, not so much before that.

nostromo 7y ago

> No street, certainly not your residential 25-mph variety, is safe from being Wazed into a makeshift freeway or thoroughfare. ... These thousands of homeowners and renters have arguably been injured by Waze’s and Google’s successful privatization of formerly public streets. This is exactly backwards. The streets were effectively privatized before, via obscurity. It is Waze that has made formerly private streets public.

wcarron 7y ago
That's complete BS. The roads have always been there, fulfilling their designated purpose; which is to handle the small amount of traffic the neighborhood residents generate in a safe manner. They were never meant to handle massive amounts of traffic, which actually does damage property values when potential buyers are scared off by unsafe streets.
- cma 7y ago
  All of that can be true and it can still have made them public. Isn't that the whole problem?
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Your property value isn't my problem. I have a right to that street that is no less than yours.
  - Doxin 7y ago
    Sure, But people have a right to not unexpectedly live next to a highway as well. There's a balance here that needs to be struck and that balance is not doing whatever you like with disregard of if that bothers anyone else.
    - prepend 7y ago
      Not if they live next to a public road. As long as folks follow the speed limit there’s nothing you should do. I mapped out the roads around my house before buying. If you live on a shortcut public road you’ll get lots of traffic.

RhodesianHunter 7y ago

Technology is created to solve a problem. Technology has unintended consequences. Technology owners have feduciary responsibility to continue producing technology. Negatively affected citizens make a fuss, claim they deserve more rights than other citizens. Media creates hit pieces, painting the most negative possible picture in an attempt to look like investigative journalism. Government either ignores the problem, or grossly overreaches, leading to further unintended consequences.

lidHanteyk 7y ago
Oh nice! This is Discordian 5-act structure. Chaos: Our protagonist, New Tech, arises. Discord: As a consequence, the first antagonist looms: Unintended Consequences. Confusion: New Tech is not dissuaded. It moves boldly, embracing what it sees as positive change in the world. Bureaucracy: Unintended Consequences summons the evil power of Somebody Else's Problem, and reveals their true face: Angry Mobs. The Aftermath: The Government steps in. They ban New Tech, establish a Committee to Study Somebody Else's Problem, set up a fund for Unintended Consequences, and violently suppress the Angry Mobs. Recall that, in Discordian 5-act, the protagonist is arbitrary, and usually chosen to maximize irony, bathos, or confusion. Our goal is to remind the audience of how silly it was to think of anything or anybody as morally absolved.

PaulHoule 7y ago

I grew up in Southern Hew Hampshire, one of the sprawliest places in the U.S. The architectural principle of Southern NH is that streets are not organized in a grid but rather in a hierarchy. They add more suburban "pods" at the leaf nodes with resulting uncontrollable traffic increases at upper levels. A street grid scales in an entirely different way in that if you build more grid you add both short- and long-range access at the same time. A town I live near added "traffic calming" measures, in some cases draconian. (e.g. When the cop catches you turning towards the supermarket when you shouldn't be you tell him that you're entirely confused by the streets in the area, you blow 0.0, and he says he is confused by it too.) As soon as traffic calming went into place, traffic got much worse on nearby arteries, particularly wait times at street lights. My current theory is that a good traffic route avoids stop lights like the plague. It's inevitable that you will hit stop lights, wasting your time and fuel. If you go to places where traffic concentrates, traffic will eventually outflow the ability of cars to clear the intersection during the green cycle. So a single traffic light causes you to be stuck for several cycles. If you think for yourself you realize that you can clear 10 stop sign intersections in the time that you can clear a bad pair of lights. I don't apologize for any of this behavior because I am making life better for people in the herd by getting out of it.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

The problem isn't Waze. It's the sprawl and failure of urban planning. More dense, more mixed use development is what LA needs. Less cars implies less traffic. Make cities walkable. But, it is too late for that. Homeowners have decided carte blanche to oppose new development. This is the price they pay. LA will never return to being a city with one-tenth its current population, where every family gets a 6,000 square foot lot, a car and 2.1 kids. Plan for it.

PeterisP 7y ago

A nice quote from the article - "The mayor spoke proudly of this shining example of the city’s “data initiative,” and how the Waze partnership would “get people where they want to go, faster.”" followed by a dissatisfaction that it did not result in people getting sent to the roadways that the traffic planners wanted to. Guess what, people would absolutely get sent to the major roadways if (and only if!) those roadways would actually get people where they want to go, faster. If those roadways suck compared to the alternatives, then that points towards a duty of the major to improve those major roadways (which are obviously overwhelmed even after Waze helps by redirecting some traffic off of them), not a duty to drivers to simply suffer every day while sitting in a traffic jam on the "gov't recommended" route or the likes of Waze to keep mum about better alternatives. The article mentions the 'LA Complete Streets Official Guide' listing which streets the planners designated as arterial vs non-arterial - guess what, if there's a mismatch between the plan and how people can reach their destinations most efficiently, then it is the plan that's wrong and needs to change, not the drivers. If you plan and build a wider, "faster" arterial route that's actually a huge diversion and drivers take shortcuts instead of following your route, well, too bad you wasted a bunch of money building a road noone needs based on a bad plan, it's not the fault of drivers that this road doesn't suit their needs. The city was free to use its partnership with Waze to determine where to build(improve/widen/regulate) roads and intersections that would be a better fit for how people want to travel. However, instead of listening to the people through that data, they wanted to use it to tell people how to get where they want to be in a way that suits interests of city planners instead of the driver - and that's not how it works.

wcarron 7y ago
> The article mentions the 'LA Complete Streets Official Guide' listing which streets the planners designated as arterial vs non-arterial - guess what, if there's a mismatch between the plan and how people can reach their destinations most efficiently, then it is the plan that's wrong and needs to change, not the drivers. I think you are failing to differentiate between use and abuse. Roads have a specific purpose. Small, narrow side streets in dense, highly populated neighborhoods are not meant for heavy thru-traffic. Drivers using them for that purpose are, in fact, abusing them, at the expense of the people that live, walk, run, bicycle, and park in that neighborhood. In these instances, it is not that the city planners were wrong. The plan wasn't wrong. The drivers heedlessly barreling down streets never meant for that are in the wrong. > it's not the fault of drivers that this road doesn't suit their needs. You can't always get what you want. The desire to get to work 5 minutes faster doesn't overrule the right of people to have safe streets to live on. Unnecessarily diverting loads of drivers onto roads not meant to handle them is unethical.

ageitgey 7y ago

This is a well-researched traffic problem called induced demand [1] - building more roads in a congested city always makes traffic worse, not better, in the long term. Waze is giving people more roads to use, so they are in effect 'building more roads', which causes more total people to drive, which makes traffic even worse for everyone. There is no possible outcome here other than everything being worse for everyone involved, despite whatever libertarian views you might hold. Waze can only be a net loss for everyone for LA in the long term despite whatever benefits the early users got for a few years. But banning Waze is just a band-aid. The real problem is that the only way to get around LA is to drive. The real solution for LA is to re-think itself as a walkable about city with real public transit options. There isn't enough physical space for everyone in LA to get to where they want to go in a giant, personal automobile while still leaving room for dense housing. If you are interested in exactly how to redesign a city to make all transit more effective, check out the book 'Walkable City Rules' by Jeff Speck. [1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/09/citylab-university-induced-demand/569455/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/09/citylab-unive...