
Navigation Apps Turn Some Quiet Neighborhoods into Traffic Nightmares - DLay
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/24/nyregion/traffic-apps-gps-neighborhoods.html
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egypturnash
Some quick googling suggests that while people often start putting fake
accidents on Waze, it also tries to detect people who are faking it and starts
ignoring you.

I guess the next step is to build a tool that repeatedly creates fake Waze
accounts and uses them to report fake accidents in the residential streets
that Waze is turning into major commuting roads.

Or maybe the next step is to abandon the whole "people live three towns over
from their day job and drive for a half hour" thing. It's pretty horrible and
increases misery for a ton of people. Sadly, America's been building suburbs
for like sixty years now, changing this is gonna take a lot of time.

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zdragnar
What, so people should only get jobs in the town they live in? That sounds
more Draconian then China's hukou system

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sli
I don't believe OP was implying that at all. Seems more like OP is opining on
the rather large barrier some people have to living where they work vs. being
forced to commute.

Some folks end up in a situation where they can't afford to move (or, probably
more commonly, live) closer to their job, but can't find a well-paying enough
job in their own town to survive their either.

If you're commuting and can't afford to live in the city to which you commute,
you're being paid below market rate. Probably well below. It's very easy for
companies to exploit that to their benefit, and much to the detriment of their
employees.

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dankohn1
The only real solution is a region-wide implementation of congestion pricing,
which will cause the main arteries to flow freely, and mean that no one will
try to get around them.

The best plan for the greater NYC area is:
[http://iheartmoveny.org/](http://iheartmoveny.org/)

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tinus_hn
Everyone has a fantastic solution to the problem they perceive but it’s more
complicated than that.

Ultimately people need to drive less, either because they live close to their
jobs, because they use public transit or a bike, because they work from home
or any other reason.

The problem is how to get people to do that. It certainly won’t be by easing
congestion because that has the opposite effect. Short term gains because
moving cars pollute less but long term loss because less congestion causes
more traffic.

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nullc
I started avoiding using google to navigate after the second time it turned me
into a jerk.

For a particularly egregious example, CA17 between los gatos and santa cruz
frequently gets congested. The congestion appears to arise due to the capacity
limits of the segment going over the mountain-- there is no simple alternative
route around that.

For some inexplicable reason google directs a dense conga line of cars off the
highway, through a quiet residential neighborhood in los gatos and right back
onto the highway. The returning cars merge in just a half dozen cars ahead of
cars not following google.

Because the reroute just jumped the queue a bit and didn't do anything about
the actual bottleneck no good was done by the reroute, the only thing that was
accomplished was making a surrounding neighborhood less safe and pleasant.

I guess this is the kind of socially irresponsible behavior we should expect
from our new machine overlords at google. I avoid using their navigation
solutions, and when I can't I at least try to ignore their reroutes since you
can't tell when they're just telling you to make your trip seconds faster at
an extreme expense to others.

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cmurf
I liked Waze when it was suggesting seemingly out of the way secondary and
tertiary routes, that had less stop and go traffic. But the deep dive into
neighborhoods I found offensive, and inconvenient (stick shift, stop signs
every block). So I removed Waze from my phone.

And now Google Maps has starting doing it. They have an avoid highways option,
now they need an avoid neighborhoods option.

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erik_landerholm
They are doing “it” because often, in places like LA where people have refused
to fund public transport or more roads or tunnels or anything, it can be the
difference between a 40 minute drive/ride to LAX and a 2 hour one.

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Overtonwindow
I love Waze and I never drive without it. Sure driving through neighborhoods
at 25mph can be annoying at times, but the forward-looking incident and
calamity avoidance mechanism is worth it. Not to mention police.

Some thoughts:

1\. I would pay Waze a monthly fee to get premium routes, and

2\. Pay an additional fee to avoid police activity.

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tommygunz99
Time for some traffic problems in Leonia

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indigodaddy
If you can't get out of your own driveway into crawling traffic within a
minute or two, then you simply must learn to take some control and be a bit
aggressive.

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lostlogin
I’m not sure that added aggression is what commuter traffic needs. Decent
options that aren’t cars would seem better.

