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>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

• 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.
        • paggle 7y ago
          How do you feel about government setting up speed cameras at all of these side streets and issuing citations to all speeders, even those 1mph over the limit, through dragnet surveillance?
          • thrower123 7y ago
            They'd have to collect a lot of tickets to justify the cost. Are there really not more important things the legal system could be using it's resources to combat? There are child molesters and drug dealers out there.
            • paggle 7y ago
              The government is big and can do multiple things at once. Ensuring safe streets is an important responsibility. Vehicles kill many more people than child molesters and drug dealers combined.
              • thrower123 7y ago
                Opiods are giving car fatalities a run for their money.
  • nullc 7y ago
    > Especially consider that the kind of person who is willing to shave off 30 seconds a commute by cutting through a neighborhood Just a point here, part of the reason maps sucks so bad is that it directs people on these anti-social second shaving paths without informing them. Maps says turn here... but it doesn't warn you that it's turning you into an antisocial jerkwad (or that its advice is expected to save you 10 seconds but at the expense of a 5% chance of adding 10 minutes and at a cost of at least $1 in more gas). Often maps suggestions really don't make sense, even ignoring the anti-social factors, once you consider N-th percentile times or fuel costs... but you don't get to choose, they choose for you. Even if you force a particular route, google will frequently try to reroute you back onto whatever they think is the most seconds-shaving. Your option is to not use the map... which isn't really a great option, since much of the time the map pretty helpful.
• jedmeyers 7y ago
  > non-residents can't cut through them. Non-residents shouldn’t pay taxes to maintain those roads either then.
  • enoch_r 7y ago
    Streets have many purposes. They allow people to access their homes. They provide parking. They are bike routes, walking routes, scooter routes, running routes, skateboard routes, and driving routes. They are sometimes even places kids can play, or at least where parents can feel safe biking with their kids, or where one can easily and safely cross the street as a pedestrian. Not letting vehicles cut through a neighborhood street means the street serves one fewer purpose, but it means it serves every other purpose much better than before. Maybe it's worth it for some streets, maybe it's not for others. But your statement is a bit like saying you shouldn't need to pay taxes to maintain a school because you're not allowed to drive through it.
    • WWLink 7y ago
      It's also a good way to prohibit driving through neighborhoods to explore them. Whooo! Keepin the riff raff out! /s
      • enoch_r 7y ago
        Where I live, the primary goal of blocking vehicle traffic from cutting through is to protect "neighborhood greenways" from getting inundated with car traffic. These are specially designated bike routes on neighborhood streets that are some of the best, low stress, popular pieces of bike infrastructure I've ever used. So here, at least, these efforts are a terrible way to keep riff raff out, as they make your street far too attractive to riff raff using non-motorized transportation.
  • nullc 7y ago
    A road in a random neighborhood is still important to me even if I can't cut through it: The mere fact that I can easily travel to any destination connected by it is very valuable, even if I don't frequently use that ability for any single specific road segment. In addition to my own use, its very useful to me that other people I interact with can reach those properties (so that they can live near by and engage in commerce and friendship with me). A complete road network has greater value than the sum of its components in isolation, and this is true even for components even where you can't use them for non-destination travel. Following your logic, any sub-graph of roads that can't be transited to other subgraphs should entirely be paid for by the connected properties-- and that clearly is not how we do things. Moreover, the "if I can, I should" thinking strongly incentives making neighborhoods into single-access navigational cul-de-sacs, which creates worse traffic for everyone when the local traffic for the neighborhood gets funneled into a single choke point and causes congestion. A month or two ago I saw an image on reddit from florida where someone showed that it was an 8-mile drive to their backdoor neighbor due to a lack of connectivity between neighborhoods. ... that's the kind of garbage roadway network design we'd get if we can only use raw connectivity control the load and character of use of roadways.