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.
> 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.
> that doesn't mean that all streets should be maximally employed to reduce that congestion.
It does, actually, because all streets are connected and part of the same network. No matter what philosophy you subscribe to as to what the "goal" of suburban neighborhood planning is, the fact remains that since (almost) all streets are (eventually) connected, and thus the problem of lots of cars being able to drive on streets that you don't want lots of cars on is always going to be prevalent.
A better solution, IMHO, is to borrow an idea from the EPCOT[1] Concept that Walt Disney created...separating what it means to be a "street" into streets/walkways that only pedestrians may travel on, and streets that only cars may travel on. The way EPCOT would have been designed would have limited your ability to park your car very close to where things were congested. Instead, you'd park further away and take the free public transit or walk/bike where you want to go. Cars and supply trucks would always travel underground in a vast network of highways, leaving basically the entire surface of the city looking more like a massive park than a metropolis.
It would have been an incredible leap forward. Sadly, Disney died before his company turned it into "Epcot", just another Disney World theme park.
There's an important difference between streets (paved surfaces within a built-up area) and roads (an improved path connecting two points). They're different things with different purposes. The goal of streets is to enable valuable economic activity between the people and property on it, while the goal of a road is to connect separate economic areas. If you close a street to vehicles, it's still valuable, since you can walk down it to buy groceries. If you close a road to vehicles, it's basically pointless.
Basically, the problem boils down to suburban streets being too hospitable to vehicular traffic. Remove the center dividing line, remove street parking, and narrow the street down to 18 feet wide at most (this provides just enough room for two SUVs side-by-side). Allow redevelopment up to the new desired edge of the street to make it even more visually narrow. Nobody is going to commute through these kinds of streets.
And an alternative for the low-density suburban junk - replace the asphalt with gravel when it starts needing repairs. Seriously. It's both cheaper and discourages through traffic.
> replace the asphalt with gravel when it starts needing repairs. Seriously. It's both cheaper and discourages through traffic.
... at the expense of being impassable for road bikes, generating vast clouds of dust (fun for pedestrians), high noise levels (fun for the local residents), being a major pain to plow in the winter, and having the occasional rock spraying from under a tyre damaging paint or smashing someone's windshield.
>replace the asphalt with gravel when it starts needing repairs
And throws up a lot of dust and needs to be continuously patched and graded for potholes and washboarding. It can also get ripped to shreds by snowplows if the ground isn't hard frozen. (And even then a lot of material can be scraped off if the snowplow operator isn't good.)
Source: Have a gravel driveway and my family has a house on a fairly long private gravel road.
The opposite of this is also a viable option in some cases. Create a shared road space where there is no delineation between sidewalk and roadway and pedestrians maintain right of way. It is a planning solution used in some city centres [1]
I remember watching a programme about how they introduced this on a busy city centre road and weirdly it increased traffic flow while also allowing more pedestrian traffic (presumably because people and cars can move simultaneously).
Here in Utrecht, The Netherlands, we have something similar. Asphalt that's red in color, usually means "cycling lane". But some roads are completely red, with signs saying "cars are guest users".
This sounds familiar to the traffic models in some parts of large Asian cities, although more as an organic result of a lack of planning solutions? :P
Writing based on the experience in e.g. Kathmandu's Thamel district, where the same tiny roadways are shared by all pedestrians, bicycles, rickshaws and dual-way taxi and moped traffic alike. Traffic signs??
It's a totally different traffic culture to what you're used to in Europe, and it does work in its own way.
>A better solution, IMHO, is to borrow an idea from the EPCOT[1] Concept that Walt Disney created...
Thanks for the link; I'll have to check that out further. I think I've run across documentaries for cities that have similar ideas. I think new development planning should definitely take some of these ideas into account, but we also have to think about what we can do on the margin to ensure the livability of our cities.
>> that doesn't mean that all streets should be maximally employed to reduce that congestion.
>
>It does, actually, because all streets are connected and part of the same network...
Maybe I'm misrepresenting what you are saying, but generally I would think that you don't want maximal utilization of all the paths in a network. If there's a shock to the system (say a major artery is closed down due to some chemical spill) then you want alternate pathways to be available to absorb the unexpected load. Using suburban through-ways in such a case is fine. Having significant amounts of regular traffic going through them is not. Systems need slack and redundancy to be resilient.
Now, will non-residents still use residential through-ways to commute? Indeed, that is fine and can't be totally prevented anyway. But hopefully incentivizing people to use major arteries will apply pressure to improve public transit options (in order to make those arteries more efficient) and will help keep residential streets safer for pedestrians, bicyclists, etc.
What that means is the problem is going to be pushed to someplace else, normally to a poorer place. If areas of living aren't shouldering equal burden, then some other neighborhoods are shouldering disproportionate burden.
That's the symptom of NIMBY.
If we aren't talking about (1) a new transportation method without the same issues, (2) a somehow substantial decrease in cars, (3) a decline in US population that outpaces growth, then we're probably talking either about how to shoulder the problem equitably, or how to push the problem to another neighborhood so you don't have to suffer.
> What that means is the problem is going to be pushed to someplace else, normally to a poorer place.
So then, do you agree that having high-traffic going through residential neighborhoods is a problem then?
The parent post's position, as far as I can tell[0], was that the claim "high traffic residential streets are a problem" is itself NIMBY. The argument being that since all streets are part of the same network and owned by the local government, all streets are the same and it doesn't matter which ones are put to the purpose of maximizing vehicle throughput.
In this thread I have made two arguments to the contrary:
- low-traffic residential streets can help absorb excess traffic when there is an occasional shock to the system (large numbers of visitors for a holiday, a major through-way is blocked, etc.)
- low-traffic residential streets enable more communal living.
In other words, there are goals other than maximizing the throughput of cars.
Experience tells me these benefits can be had by poor residential areas as well as rich ones. With this in mind, I think it is clear that high traffic residential areas are a problem that should be addressed. You and others have suggested a host of alternative options that should definitely be discussed. If someone just wants the problem to "go away" yet doesn't care or actively resists attempts to solve the problem on a larger level, then I agree that such a person is a NIMBY. I'm not arguing against the suggested solutions. I'm arguing why we need them.
[0]apologies to the parent post if I misrepresented.
In Phoenix, major streets are on about a 1 mile grid. The major streets (mostly) go through and take you wherever you want, they're very fast and optimized for heavier traffic.
The rest of the streets connect to people's homes, they're full of speed bumps and such and while some do go through, it's a slow and twisty road with no certainty unless you know that street (or peer at the GPS) so you'd never take those roads unless you actually wanted to go into that community.
I find that it strikes a pretty good balance between helping people get where they're going and making sure that people don't have tons of cars zooming right past the front door.
I noticed that about Phoenix the first time I went there. I flew in at night, and the regular grid of street lights was beautiful. This was over 30 years ago, and if I remember correctly there was only a single freeway.
In many places the terrain simply won't allow for a regular grid layout. From my home in Minnesota I can't really go straight north, because there are a number of lakes in the way. There are a couple of roads that manage to snake their way through, but it's all fully built up areas that keep their speed limits low and safe.
There's I-10 that cuts through Phoenix east-west, I-70 that is north-south, and then they have built three highway loops that circle the city. The 101 is for the north/west part of the city, the 202 is for the south/east part of the city, and then the 303 is for the north/west part (way out there...).
It was pretty nice when I lived there, because getting places using the highway was fast, and then the grid pattern for the rest of it made it incredibly easy to navigate.
Yeah, downtown Phoenix has a thing where alternating east/west streets are one-way, as well, but for the most part, it's easy to get around here and even rush hour isn't that bad compared to some places, but it was designed with heavy traffic in mind, rather than as with older cities where they grew organically.
People travel in great numbers over long distances almost entirely for jobs. People travel in great numbers over long distances because of an imbalance between their pay and local living expenses, like with San Francisco or Palo Alto.
The urban planning that would be necessary to slow down but not stop the rising tide would be one that makes property access closer to egalitarian ideals, so that the San Francisco or Palo Alto worker making $60k can also live there without driving far. Homeowners would rather experience more traffic / a battle with Waze than see property prices drop that much. The egalitarianish access to property is an even worse proposition for them by magnitudes.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
There is actually such a thing as city planning and many streets could, in fact, not be operated by the government for broad public benefit but for the benefit of the people living nearby. E.g. in a residential zone in a suburb the streets may actually be intended to connect the homes not for through traffic.
Streets are kind of built for an expected load too right? I live on a dead end and have to assume my street would wear out faster than the neighborhood thoroughfare if it had an equal level of traffic.
Wear and tear to pavement is roughly proportional to vehicle weight to the fourth power; thus cars and SUVs are almost negligible compared to the damage caused by commercial trucks and weather. If a residential street is already marked as "no trucks", then that's all the damage prevention that is worthwhile.
That is a common suburb design: it tends to fail on the generational level. New Urbanism has a long list of evidence about the problems with suburban design.
Broad public benefit is not the same as optimal traffic utilization. There's more to life than what can be quantified / sold / made to go faster. I think this goes to the heart of the idea of what humans are for. People in the tech world tend to think humans are machines in a cosmic factory used to maximize economic output.
He did not even slightly mention the frame of optimal traffic distribution. He's talking about whether roads belong to homeowners. Optimal traffic is your frame of discussion, and then you go off talking about how tech people model human systems as factories.
It is worth framing this homeowners Waze sabotage as a NIMBY problem, because if the cars aren't being routed through their neighborhood, then it's being routed through someone else's neighborhood. The consequence of unequal distribution of traffic burden means that some people shoulder more burden because they lost in some conflict or competition, whether that's the war of politics or not having enough money or whatever.
There should at least be the empty-handed gesture of discussing why other (poor) people should shoulder disproportionate burden.
If people aren't discussing a substantial global reduction in vehicles, a revolutionary new transportation method without the same issues, or a decline in US population that outpaces growth, then they're talking in code about pushing the problem to somebody else.
I think it's an solid albeit tacit frame: "broad" and "traffic" is the key terms here. You're either on the side of a street being most useful for the people directly connected to it (residents) or you're on the side of people far away who need to get somewhere else (commuters, et al). This is a case where "compromise" means both people don't get anything like what they want.
And what brought us here? Treating people as abstractions. Something we in the tech industry do all too much. Myself included.
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.
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
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.
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.
Not entirely sure I agree with that. Roads are not paid for by "everyone's taxes." Many roads are paved/maintained using funds provided by a local municipality. Thus, by that definition, in many instances, a "local road" is indeed paid for and, in a sense, "owned" by the residents who pay taxes to the local municipality that uses their tax dollars to improve said roads.
It is entirely one-sided to side with the general public, and I am firmly for looking at the broad scope. The US is stuffed with local control, and it's produced a global minima as people attempt to optimize for local maxima. Time for that to end.
A fine point in an ideal world. The problem is that as traffic increases, the number of people that drive in a way that doesn't respect the safety of the neighborhood increases. There's a distribution of types of drivers at play here--more samples necessarily results in more observations of people driving poorly even if they are outnumbered. People who have a tendency to look at their phones rather than the road due to their use of an app probably skews the distribution a bit as well.
I'm all for utilization of public infrastructure, but I'm also sympathetic to the homeowners who observe the safety of their neighborhoods decrease as a result of increased traffic volume.
> A fine point in an ideal world. The problem is that as traffic increases, the number of people that drive in a way that doesn't respect the safety of the neighborhood increases. There's a distribution of types of drivers at play here--more samples necessarily results in more observations of people driving poorly even if they are outnumbered. People who have a tendency to look at their phones rather than the road due to their use of an app probably skews the distribution a bit as well.
> I'm all for utilization of public infrastructure, but I'm also sympathetic to the homeowners who observe the safety of their neighborhoods decrease as a result of increased traffic volume.
I for one have zero sympathy for people who put up street signs on their own saying no through fare. Personally, I'd say that is a criminal offense.
I have zero sympathy for home owners who think their rights extend to the streets.
There are other ways to increase safety. Stop signs, speed bumps (sparingly!), very low speed limits (I'd say less than 20 mph) are all low hanging fruits.
No, you should not play on the streets every day. Block parties and such that happen infrequently (think once a month and probably only for a few hours) won't be a problem. However, people who say no through fare on their street are guilty of NIMBY.
It's a bit odd that you brought up gated subdivisions; so you think that property taxes don't pay for the right to live on a quiet street? Only people who pay for a gated community get to live on quiet streets?
You're paying for the right to be able to use that street - and for the street to be maintained in working condition, not any of its specific qualities.
I find it hilarious that NIMBYs would complain about noise, when they hire gas-operated lawnmowers to keep their lawns tidy for them.
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.
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.
Meanwhile maybe two children die in drowning incidents because fire engines and ambulances aren't able to effectively navigate your makeshift 'traffic abatement' program. How's your compromise now?
Moreover, the city planners get to pick one of three doors only one of which has a traffic abatement program. After choosing a door, one of the other doors is revealed to have a goat behind it. Should they switch doors?
Suppose that the thieves escaped, and then later that night they killed your Uncle Ben. At that point you realize that with great power comes great responsibility. You go home, design a suit with a spider emblem on it, and then use your newly created powers, brought on by a radioactive spider bite for societal good, not personal gain.
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...
You're conflating two notions. One of a "penalty" which is something that is inflicted, and one of "consequences" which just happen.
Children who aren't taught money management and nutrition will end up having shorter and worse lives on the average. Is that a consequence or a penalty?
Clearly the children aren't being intentionally murdered in order to punish their parents. That's so far from reality that there's no sense pointing out that I'm wrong.
I would have written "death consequence", but that doesn't roll as trippingly off of the tongue. Try not to read the subtext instead of focusing on a legal interpretation.
The whole point of my comment was that it's the children who suffer when a parent fails to teach them basic safety, therefore saying "Well when I was a kid, they just taught us not to do this" is kind of disingenuous. That kind of statement seems to be pushing personal responsibility as a superior solution, even though very young children are not responsible for this kind of mistake.
Just by saying "trippingly off the tongue" you are admitting the use of a cheap rhetorical device.
The fact that you phrased things a certain way means that you want things to be perceived in a certain way.
And yes, children do suffer when parents fail. In all aspects of life. We can't legislate that away. It'd be like trying to legislate away stupidity and negligence.
I was responding to a guy who said "(Shrug) When I was a child, I was taught not to play in the street". I was talking about his attitude of placing responsibility on children, which you would know if you had actually read my comment. Seriously, read it again and show me where I said anything about childproofing the world.
Your emotional kneejerk comment that has nothing to do with what I wrote would surely be very popular on reddit, but this isn't that place, so I'll thank you to kindly stop speculating about what is in my mind and focus on what I actually typed.
There you go again. "Emotional kneejerk comment". "Popular on reddit". (Focusing on what you actually typed which are attacks devoid of facts.)
We're not placing responsibility on the children, we're placing responsibility on the parents. If your parents are not good at being parents, then you'll have a higher probability of bad events happening to you. Nothing we can do will change that, unless we want to put everybody in a state orphanage so that each child can have equal opportunities.
> We're not placing responsibility on the children, we're placing responsibility on the parents
Here's the quote that I replied to, the ONLY quote that I replied to, the ONLY thing that I was discussing:
"(Shrug) When I was a child, I was taught not to play in the street"
And that quote kinda sounds like placing responsibility on the children. "Here's the solution: Simply have parents who teach you responsiblity. That's what worked for me."
Sure, don't reply to the comments about your personal attacks re: "Emotional kneejerk comment". "Popular on reddit". Both of which smack of smugness.
You're putting words in the other person's mouth, which is what you're accusing us of. "kinda sounds". Then you put in quotes a sentence you made up hoping to add legitmacy to your remarks.
> Sure, don't reply to the comments about your personal attacks
Thanks. I prefer to avoid meta-discussions based on emotional content that has nothing to do with the topic of conversation.
> You're putting words in the other person's mouth, which is what you're accusing us of. "kinda sounds". Then you put in quotes a sentence you made up hoping to add legitmacy to your remarks.
I accused someone of putting words in my mouth when they said "childproofed to the extent you probably have in mind". I do not want to childproof the world, and he has no idea what I have in mind.
But what I was doing by rewording the quote I've been attempting to discuss, is a standard tool for achieving understanding. You reword someone else's argument, and then they can either point out how you were inaccurate, or agree with your characterization, either one of which allows the conversation to proceed.
If you don't care to do either of those things, then I guess you're done discussing the actual topic that this whole thread is about. In which case I think I'm done here.
Except in this case it's the parents arguing for these traffic abatements, how about instead of faffing around with taxpayer money they be better parents.
Perhaps the parents are arguing for traffic abatements in order to protect children other than their own? I would be brokenhearted if the child down the street was killed by a fast car right in front of his porch, even if it was his own parents' fault for not teaching him properly.
Or perhaps these parents understand that even the best parent can make mistakes. Kids are crazy. My 3.5 year old was out of sight for about a minute while her mom went to the bathroom, and she managed to move a potty chair over to the front door, undo the deadbolt (which she had never even attempted to do before), opened the front door, and went walking down the street. Shit happens. Kids are dumb. It's nice to have more than one layer of protection.
21461. (a) It is unlawful for a driver of a vehicle to fail to obey
a sign or signal defined as regulatory in the federal Manual on
Uniform Traffic Control Devices, or a Department of Transportation
approved supplement to that manual of a regulatory nature erected or
maintained to enhance traffic safety and operations or to indicate
and carry out the provisions of this code or a local traffic
ordinance or resolution adopted pursuant to a local traffic
ordinance, or to fail to obey a device erected or maintained by
lawful authority of a public body or official.
How does your average driver know that the traffic control signage is official when the residents are putting up their own privately owned signs for traffic control?
If they have to 'err on the side of caution', then the residents win, despite having no legal right.
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.
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.
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...
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.
To get to 12 tickets an hour, you need at least 12 offenders an hour which is probably the bottleneck the GP alluded to.
That said, 5 minutes per ticket pretty much requires offenders to present themselves in a nice, orderly line. A more normal scenario where the officer has to cruise around, pull someone over, get out, talk to the person ("no no, I'm not passing through, my sick uncle lives over there"), write the ticket and get back in the patrol car, I'd guess closer to 15 minutes as a lower bound.
Also, doesn't Waze have a feature where you can warn other driver against this kind of thing? That would further reduce the ticket-rate.
I think you underestimate the average cost of a ticket. Our city sets the minimum ticket price close to the maximum price set by the state. It is hard to get away from less than a $250 ticket. The means of writing a ticket are automated. The second they type in your plate it looks up your record, which they cross check your ID. The cop verifies it and sees if you have any warrants or are committing any other crimes. It prints out on a handheld unit the officer carries. Most of the time you are in and out in less than 5 minutes. If you are not, it is very likely you are paying much higher fines.
$400/hour would still be plenty. Usually they go after speeders, which are really easy to catch, because everybody speeds. It's often an unwritten rule that you don't get ticketed unless you're going 10+ over the limit, but revenue-hungry jurisdictions don't need to honor that. I'm sure Waze cuts down on this, but they can hit a trouble/lucrative spot for a day or three, then move on.
> That said, 5 minutes per ticket pretty much requires offenders to present themselves in a nice, orderly line.
Officers get exactly that when they set up shop in a place where they know there are going to be plenty of violators. Highway 66 inside of the DC beltway is HOV during rush hour. The police will just sit at the end of the on ramp and write tickets for everyone trying to cheat HOV or with expired tags or inspection. Makes for a great haul, especially because HOV tickets are $125 for the first offense, $250 for the second, $500 for the third, and $1000 for the fourth.
And court stuff is minimal for that one because there is absolutely zero room for discretion on the part of the judge if the violation is established. If it's shown that you did violate the HOV rules, then you must be fined the given amount, doesn't matter what your reasons were. If you got a ticket, it's pretty much a given that they can show that the violation occurred.
I kind of want my police force to do their controls in the most efficient manner, to catch the most violators with the least amount of manpower. (Of course supplemented with an element of surprise.)
No real reason to make a DUI checkpoint in the end of a cul-de-sac, is there?
Unless they're doing the wrong things (e.g. warrantless surveillance, civil asset forfeiture) in which case that efficiency starts to look quite terrifying.
In cases like cut throughs, or common speeding areas 3 officers can write many more than 12 tickets/hour. I see it quite frequently. 1 officer stands off to the side behind a tree and watches for infraction. Sees infraction and walks out in the road and points to the driver to pull over onto a side street into the line of people getting tickets from the other 2 officers. Really quite efficient.
Even with 15 minute per ticket, that's ~$400/hr. Assuming he spends two hours there, and gets an average of 8 tickets per day, that still accounts for almost $200,000 per year. That's a ridiculous amount. Of course, doesn't take into account individuals learning and adjusting their behaviour accordingly, instead of being repeat offenders on the same street.
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.
In Los Angeles the policy is just to parking-ticket the hell out of drivers at every opportunity.
The 'unofficial' policy of parking enforcement here is to ticket everything you see, regardless of whether or not the car is actually in violation of something.
They know it's far cheaper for drivers to just pay the fines than it is to fight the tickets. Arguing a parking ticket can literally take several entire days. Forget just contesting them in writing, the written appeals are automatically denied every single time. I don't even think anyone reads them, there's probably just some flunky at a desk who opens them and immediately sends them back with a pre-printed denial letter.
Somebody should really fight the LA ticket system in bulk.
It's what I'm doing in Chicago, and it's actually not as much money as you'd think it is. Don't get me wrong, it's still a lot and is about as predatory as it gets, but it's not in the billions, compared to many other things.
Of the parsable ones I have, the total since 2009 up until March of this year, there's been a total of $764,775,070 marked as "paid". Tickets marked with a bankruptcy flag has added up to 18,433,390.0.
Wanted to finish up some code to get better output, but I have to run.
I visited LA once, and parked for less than two hours. Managed to get a ticket even though a studied the sign for a few min to try to establish it was a legal parking. It was really hard to figure out if it was legal or not.
I imagine that jurisdictions which place a heavy emphasis on revenue from traffic enforcement are also careful to place a heavy emphasis on infractions which provide revenue to the local government.
In New York, the hack around this is to plead down small speeding tickets to stiff zero-point parking tickets "in the interest of justice". The town gets the cash, and the speeder dodges the insurance impact.
Don't think of it as a new standalone line of business; think of it as an "upsell" that your reps can incrementally sell, since you need them there to sell the occasional big ticket items.
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.
Those costs are going to be paid regardless of whether they write tickets for that or not. If a police officer is sitting around on an otherwise slow day, they might as well go write some tickets.
the ticket revenue is greater than the marginal cost of enforcement. the cops are already out there. they just need to give them more reasons to write tickets.
Most states don't allow local PDs to keep forfeiture proceeds from state-law forfeitures; the federal government allowed local jurisdictions involved in federal-law forfeitures to keep a large portion (80%) of the assets, but the standards for that program were made more restrictive a few years back, and it was suspended entirely last December (notionally, at least, as a cost saving measure), so right now there's really no way for a local PD to raise funds by way of forfeiture.
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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
You don't need to understand the point, you just need to comprehend and obey.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that a law which is frequently broken may be a bad law, but "reading and obeying traffic signs" is not a particularly high bar to clear. If such signs get ignored, it's because the average driver is horrendous at driving. The only solutions to that are vastly better driver training and testing than we have now, or autonomous cars.
I'm not sure there is a high rate of disobedience here, though. The article seems to be talking about places where such laws don't exist, although the residents may try to change that.
Once Waze integrates that law into their dataset the problem is solved. No sign required.
I suppose they can't crowdsource that information or people would lie.
There must be a system for getting traffic information from municipalities to the road databases. Apple Maps told me there was no way to drive home a couple days ago, on examination the street in front of my house was marked as closed for the day, they were paving. That is essentially a zero traffic street in a grid area but bisected by rail road tracks without a crossing, so no one uses it except the people who live on it.
Sign still required for those w/o Waze, but you bring up a fair point: not all municipalities are willing to open their data. Having a countrywide open database - updated by the municipalities directly, not crowdsourced like OSM - would help with many things, not just routing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course it also makes collisions more likely at a given speed because there is less margin for error in estimating how much space you need on either side of your vehicle.
I still can't understand this logic of "let's make the roads safer by making them more dangerous" as if the only factor is how fast people are going. Wouldn't it be better to make roads that are safe at the speeds people want to drive? Build sidewalks so pedestrians don't have to be walking in the street etc., and let bicycles use them because a bicyclist is clearly more like a pedestrian than a car?
Have you looked at any studies, many point to wider lanes being more dangerous because people drive faster on them. Don't just assume that 'wider == safer' without any data.
The flaw is thinking that the improvement comes for free. You're basically gaming human behavior. The narrower lanes eat most of the safety improvement of people driving slower. You only get the tiny bit that was left over by mistake because people slightly overcompensate for the danger you put them in.
But to get that tiny bit you're still paying the entire cost of slowing vehicles down. It takes longer to get where you're going, including for emergency vehicles. The most fuel efficient cruising speed for most vehicles is at or above 40MPH, which you're diverging from.
You're paying full costs for fractional benefits. You would be better off putting some cops on the side of the road with an EMP cannon to disable any cars that show up. Sure, it sounds crazy, but it improves safety by slowing people down so we should do it, right?
Except that there are other, better ways to improve safety. Like building sidewalks, and making sure there is enough capacity on the highways that people don't come down to surface streets to avoid it, and improving mass transit so there aren't as many people driving to begin with.
Making the lane more narrow does not have to equal putting two lanes of opposing traffic closer together. We can make the dividing line(s) wider to compensate.
To wit, this conversation revolves around residential neighborhoods, where cars frequently park on the street, where the speed limit is likely not 40MPH. Making the lanes narrow is meant to get people to follow the speed limits, I'd say at 30MPH or less.
> Making the lane more narrow does not have to equal putting two lanes of opposing traffic closer together. We can make the dividing line(s) wider to compensate.
And now you're doing something different than the data and will plausibly get a different outcome. If the opposing traffic is not closer together then maybe people don't slow down as much or at all anymore. And you're pushing the cars closer to the pedestrians.
> To wit, this conversation revolves around residential neighborhoods, where cars frequently park on the street, where the speed limit is likely not 40MPH.
Yet that may nonetheless be the prevailing traffic speed, and the speed that emergency vehicles can reasonably travel when not impeded by "traffic calming" measures. That you didn't expect people to get the efficiency you're taking away from them doesn't mean you aren't taking it away. Moreover, fuel efficiency is a curve with an inflection point somewhere above 40MPH. That means 40 is better than 30, but it also means 35 is better than 25 and 30 is better than 20.
> Making the lanes narrow is meant to get people to follow the speed limits, I'd say at 30MPH or less.
Except that the speed limit is generally supposed to be set at the 85th percentile traffic speed (and is generally set ~10MPH below that for reasons of politics and revenue generation), so slowing down traffic will lead to a reduction in the speed limit.
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.
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.
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.
These "if it saves just ONE CHILD" arguments can often be clarified with hard data. How many accidents have occurred to date due to excessive speed on the blind curve?
If the answer is zero, and the curve otherwise meets traffic-engineering best practices, well... stop whining.
If the answer is nonzero, maybe there's a solution other than putting up unnecessary stop signs that will just discourage respect for traffic laws in general.
But we don't have enough data to say for sure in this thread, and emotional appeals don't help at all.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I once heard from a traffic engineer that certain speed bumps are made to be gone over at 20+ Mph faster than suggested so that ambulances and emergency personnel can travel over them with little to no trouble.
I've noticed this myself in certain areas, the speed bumps taken at higher speeds cause less issues, but it still of course increases wear and tear on motor vehicles, in most cases unnecessarily so.
A speed bump was put in on a hillside residential street near where I grew up, coincidentally right near the house of a councillor.
It was taken out a few months later because of noise complaints. Turns out the locals preferred the people going a bit too fast to the people downshifting, breaking, clanging over the speed bump and then accelerating away.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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!
> 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.
It's pretty simple. NIMBY stands for "not in my backyard." The NIMBY bit of the complaint is "I don't want people driving down my street."
My concern about the traffic isn't NIMBY in nature because I don't care whether anyone drives down the street as long as they do it safely. So rather than "not in my backyard," it's "in my backyard is fine as long as you do it safely."
It isn't arduous to use the road, any redirected traffic is going back to the main streets meant to handle it, and jet fuel can and did melt those steel beams--not the three-way stop on my street.
Maybe the main streets were 'meant to handle it', but sometimes they don't. To blithely redirect everybody back there is the NIMBY part? The part where its just assumed that the public doesn't need to inconvenience me; isn't somebody taking care of all that stuff?
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.
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.
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.
I stopped using Waze because of its nutty directions: deep dives into neighborhoods, stop signs every two blocks, piles of turns, circuitous routes, etc. I do not like coming to a complete stop every two blocks, I'll take 5mph continuous over that. I do not like dumping my traffic annoyances onto neighborhoods who didn't voluntarily agree to increased traffic just to make my commute shorter, this is free loading and their roads are for them to get to and from their home, not for me to cut through to avoid bad infra elsehwere. And I don't like going even 20mph in neighborhoods with children where parked cars hide kids and pets.
All of that grief for 3 minutes of savings. It's just nonsense. So I deleted the app after a week of annoyance.
> neighborhoods who didn't voluntarily agree to increased traffic just to make my commute shorter, this is free loading and their roads are for them to get to and from their home
It's nothing against you but is this a common opinion in the US? People in neighborhoods "own" the streets? As a Frenchman saying this is astonishing as I would naturally consider that I do own the street just as much as they do and it's my right to use it to cut traffic as I see fit.
I would go so far as saying they're abusing the system by having unwarranted traffic stops and outsized speed bumps placed around their property. It's like having their cake (single-family home with a parking space) and eating it too (avoiding traffic nuisance which they impose on others).
Just a cultural difference that I had not spotted before
Portraying this as a sense of "owning" the street is unneccessarily perjorative, IMHO. I don't think that many people would argue with the idea that, all else being equal, having less traffic on the street in front of your house is a good thing. Less noise, less polution, less risk of pets and children getting hit by cars. So it shouldn't be surprising that people dislike it when traffic in front of their houses increases, and I also think it's pretty uncharitable to assume that this is because they're NIMBYs or otherwise have bad motivations.
In the broader sense, I think this relates to the tragedy of the commons. There are certain societal conventions that tend to make life better on the whole. Keeping traffic to main streets is one of them. Yes, I might gain a minute or two by cutting through your neighborhood, and you might make up a little time cutting through mine. But I don't take that shortcut, because I know it's determintal to the neighborhood and my benefit will be very small. Part of that comes with the expectation that others will in turn do the same for me.
Maybe this is a USAian way of thinking, but I believe that if everyone behaves in the most selfish possible way ("you don't own the street, so you don't get to complain if I use it to save 15 seconds"), life becomes worse for everyone.
OTOH, an excessive feeling of ownership over neighborhood roads leads to the Tragedy of the Anticommons: everyone keeps the roads in their neighborhood off limits to outsiders, so everyone gets stuck in traffic longer, with all the entailing health and environmental costs, and thus a formerly public resource (roads) becomes underutilized.
OTOH, neighborhood roads aren't designed for the same amount of traffic as main roads -- maintenance happens less often, the roads are made of cheaper materials, there are no street lights, etc.
I don't believe that they are "underutilized" by being used solely as neighborhood roads -- that is, in fact, all they were designed for.
I think the point was more along the lines of "you don't get to appropriate the road that I helped fund with tax money and that belongs to everyone". I support that, actually. If it's a public road and I drive legally and responsibly then there's no problem. Just because your house is big doesn't mean that it's a farm where all surrounding land belongs to you.
> If it's a public road and I drive legally and responsibly then there's no problem
I guess you and I have a different definition of "problem." No, you're not breaking any law. And no, I don't have any standing to make you change what you're doing. But you ARE increasing traffic in front of my house, which is a problem for me. I believe that voluntarily avoiding creating problems for other people is part of living in a civilized society. Especially when the benefit I get from creating those problems is relatively small, as it almost always is when I take a shortcut through a neighborhood.
I think it’s important to acknowledge that the decisions we make do have impacts on other people. Legality shouldn’t be the only factor in our decision making.
And yes, I agree with chrisbennet that people are probably less likely to drive responsibly when they’re not in their own neighborhood (i.e. where they don’t feel the direct effect).
I guess I can understand that feeling. Let's break it down though:
"you don't get to appropriate the road that I helped fund with tax money and that belongs to everyone"
When Waze sends me off into some neighborhood it's not usually someplace I'm familiar with, certainly not even the same town I pay taxes in i.e. I didn't help fund that road.
"If it's a public road and I drive legally and responsibly then there's no problem."
The thing is, people often don't drive responsibly except in their own neighborhood (and maybe not even then). I saw a sign once that said something along the lines "Please drive like your own kids play here." The people who take a short cut to save time are probably not the ones who are willing to go 20 miles an hour looking for kids on bikes, house cats in roads, etc.
"The people who take a short cut to save time are probably not the ones who are willing to go 20 miles an hour looking for kids on bikes, house cats in roads, etc."
This is the problem.
Where I live, people taking shortcuts roll thru stop signs and bomb down side streets, peering at their phones, speeding up as needed to validate their choice of this time-saving shortcut.
The local cops (LAPD) have bigger things on their plate than traffic scofflaws, so it leaves residents with little recourse.
The abstract principles here ("it's a public road") don't translate well into what is in reality a complex situation.
However, it is common in Sweden to respect unwritten laws and social conventions. Many neighbourhoods also have neighbourhood watch and such things. I haven't lived there for over ten years but I'd imagine not taking shortcuts through neighbourhoods with children would be a convention most swedes will respect.
There is a traditional free right to roam, but it does not extend to gardens and areas next to houses. Outside of that, it is rather permissive.
Back on topic but still in Sweden: more or less all shortcuts in residential areas are closed, either by physical barriers, or more commonly by official signs forbidding pass-through traffic, and they are typically respected.
NIMBY is more "Don't use my road, use the road one block over" - in other words, road is the same but not in front of me. Thats a little different than "Don't use my road, use the road that has 3 lanes and no children on it and is labeled for commuting" I feel like there is a difference in that regard; I personally wouldn't want through traffic on my street, but I also don't want it on the streets next to mine either due to how recklessly people drive when trying to beat traffic.
> It's nothing against you but is this a common opinion in the US? People in neighborhoods "own" the streets?
Yes, but it's nuanced. Own the streets in order to control the environment of our mini-castles (our homes), but know that we don't have a legal basis to stand on.
Neighborhood streets weren't organized in a manner to accommodate high traffic patterns, and it ends up being a real issue for local residents. It's not too much of a stretch to be upset that your once quiet neighborhood is now a major traffic jam because of a mobile app.
> It's like having their cake (single-family home with a parking space) and eating it too (avoiding traffic nuisance which they impose on others).
Multi-family units with multi parking spaces cause significantly more traffic issues than single family home.
> As a Frenchman...and it's my right to use it to cut traffic as I see fit.
Is this why people in Paris don't clean up after their dogs on sidewalks? I know Parisians don't represent all the french, but it definitely was a culture shock seeing all that excrement.
I heard from someone who visited Paris that cleaning crews would come around every night with water hoses, so that may be why you saw such a lax attitude to waste. Did you see any of that?
I think this is a chicken and egg problem here. Coming from the US, it's my opinion that the pet owners should be responsible for their own pet's waste, not the government.
It's annoying, and possible a real problem if you neighborhood does have that much traffic, but it's something that should be solved at the city level, maybe don't do construction in multiple places that causes a major jam. Either way, I seriously doubt I'll ever stop driving on a street because it's bothering the residents.
Speaking for myself, my logic doesn't consider the neighborhood roads owned by the neighborhood. I consider it public, and as such I don't think cutting through the neighborhood is illegal. I just consider it something almost like pissing in a swimming pool. They aren't asking for this extra traffic and it is after all their neighborhood. I wouldn't like it happening in mine either.
What we should have is better infrastructure on the main roads. The whole point is that they go faster than neighborhood side streets; and if that's not working then something isn't right. More or better public transit, more or better bike friendly roads, homes closer to work or telecommute. Or maybe the cauliflower neighborhood design, where basically the neighborhood is a maze, there's a mandatory 90 degree right or left turn ever 3 blocks, so it's totally pointless to use such a neighborhood for rat running. And it's not super expensive to retrofit a neighborhood this way; certainly it's more pedestrian and cyclist friendly. Plus it also slows people down automatically, no one is going to rip a 90 degree right going 20mph.
So you take all the acrimony, regulations, fines, speed bumps, dips, ugly signage away and just design the thing to be driven the way the neighborhood wants, and not designed for rat running.
As a cyclist, I avoid these mandatory-turn mazes like the plague. It's just as confusing as it is for cars, unless you put dedicated bike lanes in many of the streets - which of course isn't going to happen because, you know, they're quiet little side streets with few markings and overprotective NIMBYs. Not designed as through streets also for cyclists.
If the intention is to scare vehicles away, it's unlikely that they come out specifically for one type of vehicle.
I'd rather take the straightforward road and share with cars, thank you. (Yes, think Toronto, not Atlanta.)
I'm neither American nor European, but have lived in both for a while, so at the risk of appearing like I'm trolling - the likely explanation IMHO is just that people in the US are nice and don't want to feel like they're being a nuisance to someone, even if legally they're in the right :)
I think that's a bit tone deaf. He doesn't think he owns his street so it doesn't occur to him that other people feel that way, and that's a pretty fair stance. That mindset is why a lot of people hate the suburbs.
I'm not American either but I can understand not wanting excessive traffic in streets that were meant for feeding the suburbs. It's not that there shouldn't be cars on those streets but they're meant to connect homes not as an extension of the highway. As such, they are being somewhat misused. It's not unlike city zoning - for example, you wouldn't want to have an industrial plant in the middle of a residential zone, so why would you want commercial traffic going through the back streets of a residential neighborhood?
One part of the issue is being addressed by restricting traffic (e.g. forbidding left or right turns, etc.) but it also inconveniences the locals. I think a part of a better solution would be if the streets and roads were graded with more nuance in the maps Google/Waze/others use. As it is now, there is little distinction between a proper street or a small back street that's really just a single lane split for both directions, or something that's basically a glorified driveway.
We have an interesting situation where I live. There is a wide four lane road that is suitable trucks. Drivers who use Google or Waze, however, are directed to go down a surface street that heads to a railroad overpass with especially low clearance. At least once a year we see a truck plow into the overpass and put this crazy dent in it.[0] Then they have to let the air out of the tires and tow it.
To some degree Google and Waze seem to have caught on to this and are directing these trucks to take a left prior to the overpass. Now we have signs that disallow trucks on these roads since they are residential and nobody wants a truck running children over.[1] The last of these streets contains the local elementary school.
My point is that it's more complicated than it looks. Increased traffic is one thing, but large vehicles represent and entirely different issue. In this case, Google and Waze aren't really serving anyone at all.
Sydney makes extensive use of no left/right turn between 6-10am/3-7pm signs. It makes sure that traffic stays on the main roads instead of side streets that would quickly fill up during peak hour otherwise but isn't an inconvenience outside of those times
This American does not believe that residents "own" the streets. But I also understand the people who live on quiet residential streets would like to keep traffic to a minimum.
That's probably why they chose to live there! So I do think it is rude to consistently cut through their neighborhoods, undermining their expectation of a quiet neighborhood, and generally reducing their quality of life when there are other perfectly good routes available.
I pay for the roads in my neighborhood through increased property taxes (A MUD tax.) That said I do understand it's a public utility and don't care all that much about people cutting through.
The increase in traffic in some areas can be a safety issue. Close to where I live is a lower school. During rush hour, many drivers choose to drive down the parallel side street for about 5 or 6 blocks to bypass a minute of traffic. Often, these drivers speed and ignore pedestrians, stop signs and cross walks. Just recently, a child was hit by one of these drivers in front of the school and suffered major injury.
The community has organized with the city to add in more stop signs and is attempting to get speed bumps put in place that would control the speed of the traffic. Everyone understands that they cannot legally stop someone from driving down the street but they can add in traffic controls to lower the risk to those who live in the area and make it less appealing to leave the main road designed for higher traffic.
In our case, it isn't about owning the streets, but rather is a matter of safety.
I don't know how many neighborhoods are like mine but we recently had our roads redone and each house in the neighborhood was assessed based on the road frontage that they had. Our neighborhood does not own the street maybe but we have a financial incentive to keep them nice since the residents actually paid for a large part of the construction. An extra 45,000 cars per day would wear the roads much more quickly.
One factor is that in Europe cities are older and roads are narrower, so there is a natural disincentive to cutting and speeding through many residential streets. Having lived in London I can tell you that people speeding through narrow residential streets to avoid traffic was a significant local issue in my borough (Wandsworth).
> It's nothing against you but is this a common opinion in the US? People in neighborhoods "own" the streets?
Yes. In many suburban neighborhoods (especially predominantly white ones) people will give you dirty looks if you are a stranger walking around. If you are black many white people will call the police.
Wow.. what? Do you have any data to back that up? I don't, but from personal experience I have never seen police stopping black people in my neighborhood who are walking around.
"A woman told police someone rang her doorbell but when she called out to ask who it was, no one answered. Police responded and determined the visitor had delivered a package.
A resident called police to report that someone had tipped over his recycling containers.
A man was reported to be lying on the ground, possibly writing.
A person reported a man tried to hide his face, then turned and walked away."
Take for example Oakland, which used to have a large African-American population. Now that a lot of white people have moved in and started calling the police on blacks, some parents are afraid to let their African-American children walk around on the streets by themselves: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/racial-profiling-via-n...
Nobody "owns" the street, I don't think that's the issue.
The issue is that the street was built for 10 cars an hour and now it's getting 300. Why is that important? It determines how wide the shoulders are, whether there's stop signs or roundabouts or traffic lights, whether there's on-street parking, whether there's just painted lines or botts dots' or physical lane barriers, etc.
It's not about ownership, it's about a street that was designed for X now being used for Y.
An interesting phenomenon is resident-only on-street parking.
While I have a parking spot on my own land, in some neighborhoods you get to take a public asset and make it private for either free or 1/10th the market rate. Some are even audacious enough to put cones in front of their houses.
It's probably cultural, but yes, the idea in a suburban area like that is that the drivers are there to drive to/from the houses there, not cut through, and they drive slowly in the development because there's children playing, animals, etc. When commuters cut through, they drive too fast (it's not like there's cops there all the time looking for speeders) and that's dangerous when there's children around. The roads are made small because it's only supposed to be for residential traffic for the houses there; other people are supposed to use the high-capacity streets that are designed for that purpose.
Does France not have differently-sized streets for different traffic needs? You don't have highways there?
>I do not like coming to a complete stop every two blocks, I'll take 5mph continuous over that.
Not only that, but coming to a complete stop frequently is bad for fuel economy. I'd rather be able to configure the app to maximize fuel economy (within reason, I also want to use highways where available even though I get better economy cruising at 50 than at 70). Saving 10 seconds just isn't worth the trouble.
The other problem with this kind of overly-aggressive routing is that it's frequently just plain wrong. You can get routed onto some single-lane country road where you can't pass; if there's no one else on the road, then great, you can go fast around the curves and make decent time. But you're also likely to get stuck behind some slow-ass, and that means you'll end up taking more time than if you had taken a more mainstream route on a 2-lane road. I use Google Maps (in combination with my built-in nav based on HERE) and even though it's not as aggressive, it does this to me a lot and it's annoying.
Same. Waze is absolutely useless in Los Angeles. Every alternate route for my commute from the valley to the westside is full of worst traffic than the 405 yet it continuously recommends surface streets. These alternate routes that are supposed to save me 2-3 minutes often take much longer so it's completely inaccurate.
I'm curious if there is some threshold of traffic at which these algorithms can no longer be accurate. If so, Los Angeles has long passed this threshold.
I've stopped using Waze or any comparable apps long ago.
I don't really think Waze can be blamed here though... it's not as though it's going out of its way to choose more dangerous routes. It has no notion of how well-lit a street is, or the incline, or how many cars are parked along the curb. No GPS app has all this data. As drivers, it's our responsibility to be aware of our surroundings and make wise choices, not to rely on an app for that. If you don't feel comfortable taking a road, don't take it. How do you know Google Maps is choosing "safer" roads for you?
That said, one thing I've noticed is to actually save time on these empty side streets, you have to disregard the speed limit and stop signs. I suspect you have enough people blasting through at high speed, rolling through stop signs, that Waze learns time can be saved. Because in my experience, if you stay under 25, and do full stops, you're losing time not saving it. Waze probably knows this, and chooses not to fix it. IMO, that's the real moral dilemma at hand: you've got an app recommending routes that can save time, but only if you choose to drive recklessly.
> It has no notion of how well-lit a street is, or the incline, or how many cars are parked along the curb.
GPS also has no notion of speed traps or potholes, but Waze does because they crowdsource it. They could add a way for people to report routes that are undesirable for other reasons.
In my neighborhood, I always go the long way home because it avoids the narrow road with blind curves and kids on bikes.
My dad would always drive maddeningly slowly through residential neighborhoods, and he'd explain it with kids are irresponsible and unpredictable. I didn't understand then, but I do now.
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.
Same, I switched to Google Maps. It seems to have a much higher threshold of "time saved" that it needs to hit before sending you off on some bizarre route.
Agreed. I often ignore it -- Waze really over-optimizes; you end up going left-right-left-right down narrow streets just to save a minute.
Mostly, I'd rather sit in the traffic on the main thoroughfare and just chill out listening to music or the radio. Not to mention, the increased mileage, wear and tear and fuel consumption from the back roads and constant turns (and disrupting otherwise quiet neighborhoods).
Waze also doesn't seem to grasp the "cost" of a left turn, particularly at a busy intersection when there's a fair bit of traffic (and no traffic control). I know Waze monitors the transit time for road segments, but I don't think it includes time waiting to turn or maybe it averages it over the day and thus ends up underestimating.
+1, that's a big pet peeve of mine with respect to all turn-by-turn apps I've ever used. Most of them provide check boxes to avoid toll roads, highways, ferries and drawbridges, and the like. Why in the world don't they offer an option to avoid left turns?
I've had this problem as well. Another one I've run into is that Waze doesn't seem great at taking into account things like stop signs and traffic lights in my area. So it will re-route me down some street that has little traffic, but requires me to stop every block. Even if this doesn't actually take more time, it is certainly more aggravating.
At this point I ignore Waze re-routes unless I have a good indication that the backup is severe, and I have some reason to believe that the alternate route is reasonable. This means that I have gotten stuck in traffic a couple of times unnecessarily, but it has also saved me the trouble of numerous dubious "shortcuts."
Lights in particular are a hard problem. Depending on timing, some are a 3 minute wait, or none at all. If someone can start to model traffic light timing, it could really improve flow.
Yes. Waze has a lot of data on how people are moving on the streets, so I'd think they'd be able to figure in the average wait at any given traffic light. Maybe they do factor that in somehow, but I've seen no evidence of that. Any time sitting at a stop light seems to just extend my estimated arrival time by that amount.
I wonder how much time it really saves you, too. My experience with all sorts of apps like this (including Waze, although I haven't used it in a couple of years) is that they tend to underestimate the speed of heavy traffic, and overestimate speeds of small streets. They especially seem to discount or even completely ignore the potentially large time costs that come from stoplights, stop signs, and left turns.
These days, if my system has me get off the main road, take small streets for a while, then get back on the main road, I'll ignore it unless the traffic it shows is really, really bad. Occasionally I regret this, but I regret it less often than I regretted obeying the machine before.
Google Maps seems less aggressive about that so I run both. Google Maps for directions (tells me what lane to be in, etc.) and Waze for road hazards, cops, etc.
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.
>>> 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.
I don;t think you need even go that far. All those extra corners, braking and such aren't great for the car. They have a cost in terms of maintenance. Lots of "city miles" driving is why cop and taxi cars fall apart so quickly. I doubt so many people would follow Waze so closely if they new it was going to cost them a couple hundred extra every year in parts.
On the other hand I appreciate its advice, but don't always take it. I like knowing there could be a way around it, but I use my judgement on what shortcuts to take.
That's why I stopped using it. Google Maps is much more conservative, but still lets me know about problems on my route and alternatives.
It feels like a classic probability problem. A shortcut has a low number of samples and high variance. The main thoroughfare has lots of same and low variance.
Maybe they could show confidence intervals "This route is 2 minutes faster ±5 minutes" :)
Wouldn't it be interesting if there was an app like Waze, but it's primary focus was safety? People report intersections or roads with blind spots, bad lighting, lots of jaywalkers, etc.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a certain amount of irony here that people are complaining about cars clogging up their streets but think nothing of what they do when they're driving through other neighbourhoods, especially more urban ones.
Suddenly they get a taste of why people living downtown are not too enthused about highways bringing in more people.
A lot of this mess stems from the absurd designs of modern American subdivisions with their pointlessly twisty roads. A grid-based layout might mean more through traffic, but the traffic can filter through many, many different cross-routes rather than funnelling through the singular optimal route.
> A grid-based layout might mean more through traffic, but the traffic can filter through many, many different cross-routes rather than funnelling through the singular optimal route.
That singular optimal route funnels traffic away from my kids riding bikes, playing street hockey, drawing chalk cities, or anything else their little minds can come up with. It's why houses on a 'quiet street' are coveted, and sell for more than the same house on a busy street.
To call a design like that 'absurd' you'd have to completely ignore all of the reasons people want to pay more for it...
About a year ago, a traffic accident caused Waze to route me through a residential area. I actually respected the speed limit as I went through, and at one point saw kids playing in the street just as I was making a turn, so I slowed further.
That didn't stop some busybody dad from flagging me down. I opened my window and he told me I'd better slow down (I had) because there were kids playing. My response to him was that he oughtn't let his kids play in the street. He started ranting, so I pulled away, and he shouted after me "SLOW DOWN YOU ASSHOLE!!".
When I got home, upset by this, I went back and looked at my logs. I also use an app called Torque that logs all the data from my car's OBDII port, and GPS data as well. So I was able to verify that at no point was I going more that 5mph below the posted limit, and from the point where those kids were visible, I was going far slower than that.
My conclusion from just one datapoint is that people are irrational about what they allow their kids to do (play in the road) while expecting other people to accept and mitigate the potential risk; and also that people have little ability to estimate vehicle speed accurately.
Why can't kids play on a street designed only for traffic to houses on that street? I played on the street all the time as a child. Of course, my streets weren't flooded with drivers trying to save a few minutes by driving through residential areas.
Depends on the legislation - some places have "living streets", where 1. the speed limit is low, and more importantly, 2. the driver has to give way to "pedestrians and playing children". http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Spielstrasse.jpg
Still - a pretty bad overreaction from the "Dad" :(
The fallacy in your logic is that the streets were not designed for kids to play in. They are designed for cars to drive on.
Furthermore, like was mentioned by previous posters and the article, there are further legal traffic laws that can be implemented to protect side streets from incurring unreasonable or unsafe traffic (e.g. no thru traffic, rush hour restrictions, lower speed limits, additional stop signs or even speed bumps, etc). By all means, local governments should be using these laws and regulations to ensure neighborhood streets are as safe as possible. However, even with minimal traffic, kids playing in a street will always be a risk. If the street does not have adequate safety measures AND enforcement then as a parent you should not allow your child to play in or near the street without accepting the risk.
Most streets in older parts of the country were not designed for people to drive on, and plenty of children played on them. Motor vehicles simply killed enough children when they first became common that children were forced elsewhere.
Streets are not just paths for cars to pass-through on. They are a part of the places we live. They should be safe even for playing children. Cars can pass through cautiously, allowing children to move out of the way. It's not hard to share the space.
It's a lot more reasonable in a dead-end or cul-de-sac, where any car is either going to one of the houses there or got lost, and where no vehicle should be moving at more than walking speed.
The same logic applies to non-dead-ends if only people who live in the neighborhood use them. That's why people don't want "their" neighborhood streets used as cut-throughs.
You are correct. It is not "their" street. However, it is not unreasonable for people to expect that neighborhood streets not be flooded with traffic beyond what they were designed to handle nor put to purposes for which they were not designed.
It is a public street that was designed to service the neighborhood and the traffic traveling to the neighborhood. It is not a highway.
It is easy to share a pie between two people. It is very hard to share a pie between 400 people. In the US roads ARE NOT designed as a shared space between people and cars. If you play in the road you could very well die due to one person on a phone when they shouldn't be.
>In the US roads ARE NOT designed as a shared space between people and cars.
That's the problem. Kids cannot safely play in the street in many "safe" neighborhoods in the US. They should be able to, but they can't. Americans practically worship cars. The roads are treated like sacred land. Safety and happiness are set aside for the sake of motoring.
Why should they be able to? Mass + velocity = splat. You can't deny the physics.
The Americans worshiping cars boat sailed like 70 years ago, it is too late to do anything significant about that in a short period of time without spending trillions. Unless you think replacing most of our infrastructure and moving massive numbers of people is a good idea.
And the roads are treated like scared land. They are the arteries and veins of our economy and life.
Speed limits are not targets, they’re just legal limits. The reasonable speed to be driving along a given road might be much slower than the posted limit.
It looks like you're only responding to my initial statement "I actually respected the speed limit as I went through". If you read farther, you'll see something completely in accord with your statement: "I was able to verify that at no point was I going more that 5mph below the posted limit, and from the point where those kids were visible, I was going far slower than that."
In Houston they're more strongly worded suggestions. I have to remind myself to slow down outside of the city and not get frustrated with other people who naturally drive the limit.
This is a reasonable comment and perspective, and you're definitely to be lauded for driving cautiously. Also, the father you're describing sounds irrational and insulting. But as the father of a two-year old myself, I'm sitting here thinking (a) my child is just not yet completely under control, and no matter how vigilant I am, I cannot completely eliminate all risk (not to mention the complicated issue of where ideally I'd position myself and my kid, as he matures, on the spectrum of safety vs. independence); and (b) you may be the statistical anomaly here for driving so cautiously. I'm not defending the dad, who sounds like a jerk, and I'm also not faulting Waze for making a buck by optimizing traffic patterns. I'm just putting in a plug for all the parents who most definitely realize their kids shouldn't be "playing in the street," but who are frequently shocked by how much easier it is to lock down a server than a loud and complex little creature who can't take off his shoes but who can, unfortunately, run out into the street in the blink of an eye.
I've been hit by cars twice while bicycling. The first time was my own fault, and resulted in a broken leg. The second time was of indeterminate fault, there being a question due to sun glare on a traffic light.
Why is it that when it comes to driving safety, the first and paramount factor that people jump to is speed? To be sure, speed can make some accidents more likely, and probably worsen the results of many accidents. But I don't see that it's a more important factor than inattention, failure to respect traffic signs or lane discipline, failure to signal properly, poor training, poor automobile maintenance. Of these, inattention (viz cell phone usage, but not other contributors such as interacting with passengers) is the only other one I ever see addressed.
Why doesn't society tell people "keep to the right lane" or "signal your turns"? I'm willing to bet that your neighbor never yells at motorists "stop arguing with the kids in the backseat".
There are a surprising number of blind corners and vision blocking hills in the world (especially around here). Further, increased speed results in increased distance to stop and increased energy in any interaction. There are very few accidents that cannot be avoided or mitigated by reducing the initial velocities.
I hate these people. They never have any idea how fast you're actually driving. In my experience, the person complaining is deflecting blame. The only times this has happened to me is the result of someone's dog running in front of my car because they couldn't be bothered to control it (or let their kids walk a 100lb dog next to a road).
Speed on residential roads is definitely a problem, but yelling at the people who aren't speeding isn't going to solve the problem.
That your kids have to play in the street is an artifact of the design of most suburban environments.
Instead of creating gigantic roads that give drivers a false sense of confidence, employ smaller roads that encourage people to drive more slowly and use the same space to create safe paths and trails for pedestrians, cyclists and joggers to enjoy.
It's beyond bizarre that the roads in most subdivisions are so broad, and yet by design so lightly used. The amount of space in a typical subdivision devoted to roads and setbacks is staggering.
Study after study shows that the wider the lanes and roads are the faster the traffic will go. Making a street feel like you should drive slowly causes people to drive slowly.
For example, the average suburban cul-de-sac has a wider road than a country highway where you're expected to go at least twice as fast. It's two lanes plus a generous curb-side allowance for parking that, in another twist of irony, a lot of homeowners associations don't even allow.
I've lived in grid-based neighborhoods and apart from a few hours a day when things are unusually busy it's no worse than a street I lived on that connected to nowhere. A little traffic now and then isn't going to kill you, and nobody I knew growing up ever got rubbed out by a car. You quickly learn to respect traffic and avoid it.
> That singular optimal route funnels traffic away from my kids riding bikes, playing street hockey, drawing chalk cities, or anything else their little minds can come up with. It's why houses on a 'quiet street' are coveted, and sell for more than the same house on a busy street.
Those things are all done safely on grids. Your example does not work to the logical end you want it to.
Seems like everyone buying houses in these areas disagrees with you, and logic agrees with me - a bunch of long, straight, easy to navigate streets leads to more and faster traffic. If the winding streets weren't a navigation/driving problem to begin with, why complain about them?
Grids don't help much. Take a look at Google Maps' traffic report of Los Angeles' perfect grid layout during rush hour: the entire grid is usually solid red, almost every day.
Like most other plans for ameliorating heavy traffic, it is somewhat effective for a short time, but it soon just causes that many more cars to try to drive through the area.
it actually works great with less people. the problem is hitting that threshold requires regulation, which is a political impossibility except for special events.
So less people driving leads to less traffic, what a surprise.
I think that LA takes pride in its traffic, like some kind of shared struggle.
It is the only city I have lived in that has an implied 30 minute allowance for traffic delays. Everyone understands and you can use the excuse anytime or day of the week.
You think it would be better if it were a dendritic system? It's hard to believe that e.g., randomly walling off half of those grid links would make traffic better.
I doubt it. It won't fix the fundamental problem of moving lots of people to where they want to go in the city. You can only do that by making the area undesirable to go to for whatever reason (probably not a good option), or by providing some alternate means of getting places. Unfortunately, due to the sprawling way LA is laid out, all of the other options are even worse than driving there.
In a dense area like Manhattan, transport is not so bad because walking, cabs, or the subway are all viable alternatives in many cases.
In a lower density sprawl area like Los Angeles, cabs are prohibitively expensive for most trips, the subway usually doesn't go anywhere near where you are or where you want to go, the buses are stuck in traffic like any other vehicle, and walking is dangerous (due to the lack of pedestrian-friendly sidewalks in many areas) and would take many hours for each trip.
I think the best way to fix LA traffic would be to greatly increase the density and start building upwards so that walking and public transport become viable options for many more cases, but that seems very unlikely to happen anytime soon. It'd take decades to do anyway. So for now, it looks like LA is just stuck with its insane traffic status quo.
I don't think there's much irony here. It's a matter of what came first. If you move to a busy downtown then you should know full well that dealing with heavy traffic on your streets is going to be a fact of life. If you move to a quiet suburban street which then years later transforms into a busy artery, that's a completely different situation.
I also completely disagree with your evaluation of pointlessly twisty roads. I dislike them too, but they work really well at keeping through traffic out of the neighborhoods. Many of those pointlessly twisty roads are useless for going anywhere besides the houses they serve, and even when they are useful, they're usually less useful than the main roads. Cut-through traffic is usually a problem in areas with grid layouts, because that makes the side streets nearly as good at getting places as the main road, which can easily transform into "better than" if the main road is congested. For example, the first story in the article is about Takoma Park, which is pretty griddy.
> If you move to a quiet suburban street which then years later transforms into a busy artery, that's a completely different situation.
I say this as someone who bought a house because of most of the reasons mentioned here. That being said, buying property does not somehow imbue you with the right to keep things exactly as they are for three decades while you pay it off.
Cities expand, people move in, population increases. If your quiet, picturesque residential street turns into a rush hour parking lot six years later, that's nobody's fault but it doesn't mean the right thing to do is put up speed humps (the oversized, usually movable plastic speed bumps) or whatever other nonsense you can think of to stick it to people because you were unlucky in your choice of property.
If it's not obvious I am using the royal you, not you specifically mikeash :)
I agree that you don't get to claim sovereignty over your local streets. At the same time, there's an expectation that the character of a neighborhood won't change radically and I don't think that expectation is entirely unreasonable. It's a matter of balancing competing interests. The answer is definitely not to let the local homeowners determine everything about how their street is used, but at the same time the answer is also not to destroy the quality of life of residents for the convenience of through drivers.
There's even more irony here because most new suburbs are built on appropriated farmland and I'm sure the farmers in the area are upset at all the new residential traffic and the incessant complaints about their use of natural fertilizer which produces unpleasant odors.
Then one day they build more subdivisions around your subdivision and suddenly your street becomes a convenient way to get to this newer subdivision just as you were driving down roads that were quiet before until your subdivision got built.
Increasing traffic on your street is going to be a fact of life if we insist on building out and out rather than up. Densifying existing areas doesn't create the same problems as with increased density comes other transit options, especially public transit, as well as the reduced need to travel so far since everything's packed into a smaller area.
Instead of grocery stores being a mile apart, you might have two or three within a single square mile because of demand.
> Increasing traffic on your street is going to be a fact of life if we insist on building out and out rather than up.
Its also a fact of life if we insist on building up. I've never seen a suburb that could compete with NYC on traffic snarls.
> Densifying existing areas doesn't create the same problems
Yes, it does, though it tends to be limited (at about the level where traffic is frequently slower than walking) by lack of parking spaces limiting the number of cars.
> as with increased density comes other transit options
Other transit options are necessary to allow densifying existing areas, because of the point above; you rapidly hit the point where you can't get more people in and out with existing infrastructure. That doesn't mean you don't cause the same traffic problems with density as with sprawl -- you do, and in fact you maximize them that way.
But locals also know the area better, pretty much by definition. That usually makes them safer drivers.
I know that the streets near my house are filled with kids because of the three schools nearby that use the park as a playground, that almost (not quite) every other intersection is a two-way stop instead of a four-way, and that even though the streets are wide the speed limit is 25.
A flash mob of commuters is not going to have any of those advantages, and they'll be trying to route-find at the same time, so they are going to be less safe drivers. And they're probably going to be frustrated from dealing with traffic and going too fast on top of it.
>>If the street has insufficient safety measures on it
"Sufficient safety measures" is a function of the traffic load. eg, 2-way stops work fine with small volumes of traffic, but not at all for large volumes. Changing safety measures takes lots of time and some money - they cannot possibly react quickly enough to deal with flash mobs of commuters.
It's the opposite... knowing an area well usually makes dangerous drivers. Most accidents happen within some miles from home, mainly because one "knows" the area so well one lets their guard down.
Or, that result is just an artifact of how most driving happens within a few miles of the driver's home.
If 70% of one's driving is within 5 miles of one's home, but 55% of accidents occur in that radius, then people are indeed safer drivers near their homes -- probably because of familiarity.
Source? It seems much more likely that most accidents happen within some smallish radius from home because one is much much more likely to be driving there as home is the presumably, on aggregate, most frequent starting or ending point for a person (besides, possibly work or a transit hub, etc.) – the other end points are much more dispersed, but home definitely biases the distribution of driving location and therefore one would expect to see more accidents near home even if the moment by moment probability of getting into an accident was uniform.
Certainly knowing an area can breed inattention, or risky behavior based on familiarity. My hunch is that it still works out to be safer on average, but admittedly I have no data for that.
I was always under the impression that accidents happen close to home because that's where people spend most of their time so they get a lot more chances to have an accident there.
A flash mob of commuters is going to know whether a stop is 2-way or 4-way (there are signs), and they are going to know what the speed limit is (there are signs). If someone is as attentive as they need to be while driving, it's irrelevant whether the park is a playground or there are three schools nearby or whether there are kids in a given house. I don't know about you, but if I'm somewhere I've never been before because I'm going around a traffic jam, I am even more attentive than normal.
If someone isn't as attentive as they need to be, that's a different problem altogether.
> I would think the problem is the volume of traffic faced by pedestrians and neighbors, not specifically who drives.
Possibly, but that wasn't the phrasing, and I suspect that wasn't the mindset.
> Compared to changing Waze, this is "fair". But are you really happier then?
Yes. Because if they apply to the local authority to get a road blocked for through traffic, that's the proper process to enact change at the right level.
In my part of the world, a lot of "quiet neighbourhoods" have put up boom gates at strategic entrances. Some are manned by security guards that open for you. In others, you have to swipe your hand over a sensor to make it open for you.
It's used mostly for security, but no doubt it helps with keeping traffic-avoiding individuals from going through.
Usually, yes. Car traffic flows like a liquid: anywhere it can, not where it ought to; the road is not blocked off to access - to cars, it just becomes two leaves instead of an edge, i.e. unroutable except for destination traffic.
> 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.
That's one (particularly dramatic) way of looking at it. You could also interpret it to mean that it's just about the overall number of people making use of the routes. Adding in non-locals might just push that number over a certain threshold.
I believe it's not an in- versus out-group issue as such. The issue is that the number of locals is a tiny fraction of the number of outsiders passing through, leading to a vast increase in traffic on the formerly quiet street.
When only locals who lived on or near the street knew about the route, you might see five cars a day cutting through. Now that Waze is onto it, they're seeing five cars a minute cutting through.
The neighborhood street is only better because it is sized to serve the needs of the community round it. If everyone is making use of it then it's going to fail periodically, not unlike a small blood vessel in proximity to a blocked artery.
Also, it's simply not possible at present to iterate the infrastructure the way it is to recalculate traffic timing; it's always going to be possible to arbitrage the traffic flow, so to speak.
You shouldn't need tribal knowledge like that to drive safely and to keep others safe; the roads should be marked well for everyone, and all drivers should be cautious in all neighborhood settings.
You would think that but have you been driving lately? 20% are just assholes all the time. Not to far from me some guy ripped through a school zone at 60mph. This resulted in a fatality. Of course the family was on the news saying how a nice guy he was but what nice guy drives 60mph through a residential street.
The driver died. He hit a schoolbus. Luckily, none of the kids were seated near the point of impact and none were critically injured.
Whereas to everyone else, the street looks and feels like a many-lane freeway, right? (No. It's just a convenient excuse; artificial stupidity, if you wish: "So I can't go max speed in here, Carmageddon-style? How am I supposed to know that an obviously residential street has residents? Traffic code? I barely know 'er!")
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.
It's an interesting story about Berkeley. The barriers they use were deemed illegal in a court case, but Berkeley didn't remove them.
The truth about the barriers in Berkeley: they increase the values of some homes at the expense of others. If you live on a street with barriers that restrict traffic, then your house is worth more than one on the "approved" through streets.
Is it true that this increased the value of some homes at the expense of others? At least in Portland, where similar measures (though less widespread) have diverted auto traffic away from certain streets, they haven't diverted auto traffic away from one neighborhood street onto another--rather, the goal is to push auto traffic onto particular streets designed to carry high traffic volumes. People don't rent an apartment on a commercial street to avoid traffic, so I doubt that affects property values there very much--plus, since these are higher volume roads to begin with, it's a relatively small increase in traffic.
Not to mention that proximity to these streets is a valuable amenity, even if you don't live directly on them--after all, if you'd like to ride or walk around town with your kids, it will be very nice to have a bike/pedestrian-friendly street nearby.
Is it true that this increased the value of some homes at the expense of others?
Yes, it did. When the barriers were put up, they made some streets more desirable and some less. More desirable == worth more. Less desirable == worth less.
You see, before barriers, all streets were mostly equal. Clearly some streets, like College Ave, Telegraph, etc. were not. But streets like Dwight and Haste (on the hill side) became much worse after the barriers went up.
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.
1. Bikes don't really depend on high density the way transit does. They don't do well in rural/exurban sprawl, true, but standard American suburbs are usually dense enough to make a good number of bike trips practical (the infrastructure is another matter entirely though).
2. Wikipedia says Oulu's urban density is 2300/sq mi, which is really not very dense at all.
3. In fact, apparently the suburb in the article (Takoma Park) has a density of 8000/sq mi, so more than triple that of Oulu.
Yes, but at the same time, there are good reasons for why most people have roughly in sync schedules: it makes any kind of socialization much, much easier. Yeah, you can dodge traffic by leaving for work a few hours later than everyone else, but then hanging out with any of your friends or family will be painful or outright impossible. And it's particularly important for anyone with kids to have a schedule that roughly matches them being in school.
This is true. I live on the other side of the river from Maryland and well outside the Beltway. The parts of the suburbs that are configured for cycling-as-transport get used year-round.
The only problem is the parts that are cycle-friendly aren't consistent. So, some neighborhoods are linked to commercial areas and others are not. I can easily ride the 11 miles to work without getting on any non-residential streets. But, there are areas 3 miles away that would require driving because of busy roads.
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.
Fwiw many newer residential developments (from roughly the 1990s) are built like this in the first place, which is why there are so many back-to-back cul-de-sacs, and rarely through streets that go more than a few blocks. It's mainly older neighborhoods that have the traffic cut-through problem, because they were built before developers started laying out neighborhood streets with the explicit goal of preventing through traffic.
That's pretty common. I lived in a suburban neighborhood in Houston for years and the back-to-back cul-de-sacs always had sidewalks connecting them, so it was only with a car you'd have to go around the long way. As a result it was actually a lot nicer to travel through subdivisions if you were going somewhere by bike/foot, rather than going on the busy main roads.
It's much more difficult to change streets into cul de sacs after the fact, but I can't imagine that forcing through-traffic to take certain streets doesn't reduce the value of homes on those streets, regardless of the method you use to do so.
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.
True but those non-grid layouts can also help with traffic issues as they're sub-optimal to cut through. I live in the Boston area, i'm pretty well versed with crappy layed out streets
But a "bicycle" boulevard with no bicycles still solves the problem: you can use non-major streets for local car traffic, but not for through traffic. A bicycle boulevard isn't closed to cars; it just has a barricade every couple of blocks. You can still reach everywhere you want to reach by car.
Contrary to the stereotype there are plenty of Berkeley residents who don't own bikes.
In this kind of solution bicycles are not the solution. Its about blocking residential roads to vehicles and forcing these vehicles to use planned routes, around or through. Sure, bicycles can go through them but its really about forcing cars to use engineered paths. Hopefully they did proper traffic studies for these paths but thats another issue.
I love this solution so much. I wish SF would do something similar in outer richmond, one of my biggest concerns is driving down Fulton towards Ocean Beach and having cars pull out from residential stop signs, turning the opposite direction.
If I was dictator I would force all traffic to enter and exit the residential areas at the red lights and block the majority of other roads. I am sure it would be next to impossible though as the houses on those roads with lights would block it.
In Chicago they solve that problem neatly by installing planters across the street at these points, thereby making it impossible for cars to disregard. There are a lot fewer of these, though - usually just in the immediate proximity of schools.
Clever use of one-way streets and stop signs also helps, and effectively reduces the load of cars moving through the neighborhood at high speed to just the white ones with blue lights on top.
I am sure you are right, but as a long time resident, I think this is the trees not the forest -- I would estimate these barriers reduce 95-99% of the car traffic through them, even if someone cutting through is indeed a daily occurrence. Most are quite intimidating, many are totally impassable or require significant ground clearance.
SUVs and crossovers are becoming more popular by the day, so this might be more of a problem than people imagine. I wonder if there is a way to discourage cars with high ground clearance--a rollover hazard, perhaps?
The mean detour caused by this break for non-contrived trips is 1 block, which in this case is about 450 ft. You can't stand to go an extra 450 ft in a car?
St. Louis did a similar thing, basically as a crime prevention measure, but a side effect is that it's nearly impossible to use side streets to cut through many neighborhoods in the city.
<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.>
This "fix", of course, just resulted in through traffic shifting to the nearest residential through street. I have a friend who lives on a street next to a blocked street, and it has solid through traffic for the morning commute.
They totally did!
I don't count the times I forgot about this while I was stuck on the eastbound traffic on university ave, attempting to outsmart the traffic by cutting through the blocks on the south side. Most of those blocks are barricaded nimby style, and you end up having to drive several extra miles, worsening your carbon footprint!
Indeed, you can see this in the Dallas area. The major roads have run out of room to expand and according to the old timers traffic is no better than it was in 1990. All the road expansion did was let people move to ever more distant suburbs.
>All the road expansion did was let people move to ever more distant suburbs.
Yes, this is called 'induced demand.'[1] And I think that Waze may be planning its own obsolescense: once it has optimized all the streets and roads in a city, they will all be equally slow.
Yes, but eventually, if the roads are big enough, time itself is the deterrent to commuting a long distance. We've never gotten to that point since highway traffic never moves at speed during rush hour. The other driving factor would be wear and tear on the car - and the costs associated with maintaining a vehicle, but since Maryland doesn't have a yearly vehicle inspection, people are free to drive around on bald tires in a car with no brakes.
In the California Bay Area, this is not true. There is a non-trivial number of people who are willing to commute 2+ hours each way in order to live in bigger, cheaper houses in "safer" neighborhoods.
The same is true of the Washington DC metro area... However, in both cases, I would bet that the distance involved is about 50-60 miles. If that traffic were moving at speed, it would be an hour commute - and I would submit very few people would put more than that amount of mileage on their car everyday (>30,000 miles/year).
Given how the average car made today can do 200,000+ miles with minimal problems (especially if they're mostly highway miles), I don't think "putting too many miles on the car" would be a limiting factor.
This has been the case in Los Angeles since the 1960s.
The first time I went to L.A. we got in around 5pm on a Friday and planned to drive North on the 405 and get up to Venura or Santa Barbara before finding a hotel, which looks possible on a map.
It is possible if you go at some other time, but definitely not possible on a typical Friday afternoon. We got caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic and pulled off at Santa Monica Boulevard and found a hotel which looked right out of Pulp Fiction.
If you are going to most points north of LAX (to Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Burbank, etc.) a cabbie or Angelino will take you on surface streets because you get there way faster.
While this paradox might be a good theoretical tool for theory, I've disagreed that it is a good tool for modeling real situations since first hearing about it.
* It is unrealistic that the mid-route would ever be created as described.
* It is also unrealistic that the capacity of two parallel routes would also vary so much and have a mid-point where that reverses.
* It would be much more realistic to have two routes, one of higher natural capacity, which react differently to increased load (not a static, no matter what, over-simplification).
* Finally; it still does not address the issue of systems that are literally unable to cope with peek load; such as modern metro freeways in the US.
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.
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?)
The approach in the UK is increasingly to regard the gridlock as an educational opportunity, whereby drivers learn to leave their cars at home and take public transport. combined with decent public transport investment, heavy road calming on non-main roads and progressive removal of parking spaces in town centres it's really having a very positive impact for everybody except the people who bizarrely still choose to sit in the gridlock.
Fair enough, but that tells you that the solution is not "just provide public transportation". That was my point and, I suspect, the original commenter's point as well.
while this clearly does happen, urban residential streets in the UK are usually much narrower and invariably reduced to a single lane by parked cars. They are also less often in a grid pattern which supports rat-runs, and most problem rat-runs have been identified and either blocked or traffic-calmed to death 20 years ago.
London and Paris have great subway systems, and yet somehow the streets above the subways are always gridlocked just as much as any American city I've seen.
Indeed. But it's then up to you to choose which is more convenient to you: gridlock in your private bubble, or getting places with the rest of the public.
Well the story mentions roadwork starts, traffic increasing... roadwork ends, traffic stays increased as some drivers now use that route as matter of habit...
I know I use a more varied bunch of routes thanks to Google Maps and Waze, some of which become preferred back-roads.
There seems to be a new reality, a new problem with population growth and GDP fetishism: GDP rises with the number of people participating in the economy, true. But GDP and accompanying tax revenues don't rise enough.
Infrastructure becomes overloaded and the government fails to expand capacity sufficiently. Tax revenues rise somewhat, but, again, not enough to pay for the necessary expansion. Traffic gets worse.
One solution would be to literally force everyone to take high efficiency, high density modes of transportation (trains, public buses, carpools, chartered buses, etc) but local and even state governments don't seem to have the legal power (or will?) to do so. The gridlock continues.
Even if they had the power, or will, governments in ostensibly free nations shouldn't be forcing their population into a form of transport, just as they shouldn't be forcing their population into specific jobs, specific homes, or specific religions.
Force? No. But planning, incentives, market-oriented policies like congestion charges? Sure.
The reason traffic gets so bad during rush hour is a simple case of supply and demand: limited supply road of space, lots of demand, and most importantly, the space is effectively free. If cities charged something approaching market rate for the space, traffic gridlock would disappear.
Of course, this is impractical to do in most US cities, because of a lack of alternative ways to get around. Thus, the first thing that needs to happen is to provide more options; once that's done, you can work on incentivizing people to take the methods that can support more people.
We have the congestion charge in London. Initially the traffic did drop, but now the traffic is just as busy, and the gridlock lasts all day.
Cities like London, NYC and SF are expanding very quickly in terms of population size and density, so in transport terms,
the solution will have to be something like automated self driving cars integrated into a conveyor belt like system, which incentivise ride-sharing.
> We have the congestion charge in London. Initially the traffic did drop, but now the traffic is just as busy, and the gridlock lasts all day.
My guess is that this is for the same reason as the fact that housing prices have gotten crazy high in London over the last decade: demand has continued to outpace supply (and in this case, the congestion charge). I mean, you can always suppress traffic if you're willing to raise the price high enough, right? It's just that politically, that can be a hard thing to do.
> the solution will have to be something like automated self driving cars integrated into a conveyor belt like system, which incentivise ride-sharing.
Sure, Minority Report-style traffic systems are probably a good idea in the long run (although that kind of thing is obviously a very long ways out). We'll still have to make investments in other, denser modes of transportation, though, as well as market-oriented policies like parking fees and congestion charges.
Minority Report style fancy transportation is totally unnecessary. All we need is an automatic congestion charge similar to Uber's surge pricing. Heck, such a system would work great for keeping traffic out of residential areas too.
I view it a bit differently. Trading freedom for efficiency sometimes makes sense.
I have to admit that governments force us to do all kinds of things, and I accept that, mostly. For me the debate is about which things the government can mandate.
If turning three out of four lanes on LA's stretch of the 405 freeway into HOV lanes meant that commute times from the Valley to Culver City became a reliable 20 minutes, I think I might be happier.
If wishes were horses, we'd all ride; in reality, such broad changes tend to have various side effects, which are often unpleasant enough to obliterate the intended positive effect.
Sure. But LA's increasingly frequent and widespread gridlock also has serious negative effects.
Having government impose some new orderly process on a chaotic and inefficient transportation market (i.e. freeways) is not necessarily worse than the status quo.
LA is grappling with a serious mess. It's affecting the business climate significantly. People can't reliably and predictably get to their place of work. The unpleasant side effects are already here.
In many cities in Japan, you have to show proof of access to a parking spot to register a car, which limits the amount of cars to the amount of residential parking lots.
GDP/capita is an important figure. But it doesn't tell the whole story.
(e.g. I don't think GDP/capita takes into account crowded freeways overflowing onto residential streets.)
More generally GDP/capita does not take into account the unevenness of changes in quality of life which occurred on the way to a higher overall GDP/capita.
Can we really say that one statistic is "the important figure" ?
You are correct. But it is still more meaningful than GDP alone. For example here in the UK a plot of GDP says the country is getting richer, but a plot of GDP/capita says everyone in it, is getting poorer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, you see a little microcosm of how the whole San Francisco housing boondoggle was born. New York's building codes in particular are... stunning in their complexity. Same shit, different city.
People get real, real, real hot about their houses. And their parking. And people driving by their house, or walking past their house on the sidewalk. Or what gets built across the street from their house... et cetera.
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 :-/
While I hear you, and in many ways agree, I will say that, when I was a homeowner, I had a next-door neighbor who always parked his cars in front of my house instead of his own (he filled his garage with stuff.) Yes, it was a public street and yes, he had the legal right to do so, but it was pretty annoying to have to look at his cars when he had clearly wanted to avoid looking at them himself. After a while, I began parking my cars in front of his house, instead of in my garage, just to make a point...
Yes, this is when I've had a problem with it as well. A neighbor has the option of parking in front of his own house, or mine. He chooses mine, which results in a longer walk for him. Why would he do this? Because he doesn't like having a car parked in front of his house. Implicitly acknowledging that he sees having a car parked in front of the house is a bad thing, and by relieving himself of that bad thing, he's imposing it on me.
Yes, in the scheme of things, this is SUPER minor. No, I've never complained to anyone about it. But I do think it's a little bit disingenuous to just say "it's a public street, anyone can park there" without acknowledging that if there were no negative, they'd be parking in front of their own house instead of mine.
It just irritates people to look out there and see someone else's car. Most folks know anyone can park on the street, but they still get annoyed.
What's strange here is the guy is parking in front of someone else's house rather than his own. Never heard of that. I would think most people feel a false sense of possession over the street in front of their house, in part so they can park their own cars there and keep an eye on them.
Personally, I preferred to look out at the nice tress across the street rather than at my neighbor's old beaters. It was a suburban area. When I've lived in a city, it didn't matter, as there was always someone's car in front of my place.
The last interaction resulted in my then-girlfriend's next door neighbor banging on her door and literally screaming at her. I'm not exaggerating. I've never seen a grown man foam at the mouth, but yeah, that apparently did it.
Never, ever, ever buy a house without off-street parking. I don't even care if you don't have a car. Just don't. I would hate to live that man's life.
I will say that I have seen the kind of people bitching about this Waze thing, and... sigh. The suburbs, man. People are funny.
Its funny because I find myself wondering who's parking in front of my house all the time. I have to take a breath and remind myself each time that its not MY street and that anyone can park there. I'd never actually give anyone any trouble for parking out there though
I don't have a problem when people park in front of my house. I do have a problem when they block my driveway, though, as has happened before. Sure the street is public, but I have to be able to get in and out.
> As is parking in a private driveway in a manner than blocks a public sidewalk.
Laws like this becomes really interesting when you build neighborhoods in certain ways.
In my neighborhood, the houses were built very far forward on the lots and thus very close to the sidewalks. Looking out my front window right now, I'd estimate it's less than 10 feet away. This has the effect of making it impossible to park in your driveway without blocking the sidewalk unless you have a very small car - like a Smart car or something.
Add to this that the HOA has a rule against long-term overnight parking on the street (which they define as more than five consecutive days). Which means that you either have to put every car in a garage, or break some law or rule.
Fortunately, most of these rules are unenforced. To my knowledge the HOA has only ever asked one person to move a vehicle off the road, and that one was parked there for months, obviously disabled and becoming an eyesore. Every now and then when I'm working in the garage I need to leave my truck parked out overnight. I always feel bad blocking the sidewalk, but then I look around and see probably half the neighborhood doing it too.
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.
>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]
> 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?
Petition the town to do it and it's legal. Putting up bootleg signs? Probably not legal.
It sounds like they may have had town cooperation. (In Cambridge, MA and surrounding towns, we have many "no turn onto this street between 7-9 AM and/or 4-7 PM" and the street I live on is two way for 99% of its length and one way for the last 20 feet or so [to prevent it being used as a cut-through.)
I may be mistaken, but from following along with my helpful city councilor's email list, I believe Cambridge actually has to get state approval for all of these. I think that's a good thing.
On the second point, I tend to disagree, believing that local government governs best and that travel/turn restrictions on residential side streets in Cambridge ought to be a city matter, not a state matter, IMO. (As a thought experiment, why shouldn't they need Federal approval for them? Why state exactly?)
I can think of a few reasons. Drivers should be protected from a mishmash of locality-specific traffic configurations and rules, so it's beneficial to have the state enforce some uniformity and best practices (and obviously a good bit of that is derived from the Feds).
Also, the state (and thus the state's taxpayers) ends up paying for a good chunk of local roads. Cambridge or any other locality shouldn't have free reign to let NIMBYism make life difficult for out-of-town commuters.
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.
The roads are administered by the local governments. A lot of the time it is not the local residents who are using these shortcuts.
Either way, the town I grew up in had a number of "No through traffic" signs. Generally in areas where people would cut through a neighborhood for a right hand turn instead of going through a light-controlled intersection.
There is a moving violation in many jurisdictions called "Avoiding a traffic control device" that allows officers to ticket people who cut through parking lots and alleys to avoid traffic lights, etc. Laws that restrict the use of smaller roads are consistent with this philosophy.
Regardless of who pays for the road, residential streets are not designed to handle the larger traffic volumes of major streets. The road surfaces are not as durable as major roads, and traffic control devices that are safe for a residential area are not safe for higher traffic loads.
People are not entitled to use things just because their taxes paid for some proportion of that thing. You can't show up at an armory and ask to borrow a gun to shoot some squirrels. Without rules and incentives regulating the use of public goods, public goods are abused, leading to the tragedy of the commons.
This might seem like a design issue, but you can design residential streets to be poor shortcuts by making them curve all over the place and installing traffic calming measures, except these measures also typically make neighborhoods less bike-and-pedestrian friendly when compared to normal gridded streets. One-way streets and traffic restrictions work just as well though. You also avoid the issue of entitled drivers honking every time they go over a speed bump or are obstructed by a pedestrian they think is taking too long, or a USPS truck that blocks one lane every day at the same time.
The same way the doors of public schools can be locked at night, and a property tax receipt does not get you a set of master keys.
I think this is something a local government should not do, but it's certainly within its authority (assuming it is the sole funding source - federal or state money may - and IMO should - come with overriding strings attached).
I'm talking specifically about a road. There are reasons buildings are locked, &c. Also, no muni pays for roads alone. They all get state and fed dollars.
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?
The notion that because a road was paid for with "public money", that ought to guarantee unfettered access to that road is just a fundamentally juvenile, silly idea.
I didn't say unfettered access, I said access. Unless there are specific, justifiable reasons, public things should be publicly accessible. i.e. you can't rifle through your mayors paper's or freely walk in prison, though many are sickeningly privately owned. You should, however, be able to use a public park. Would it be wrong to limit the use of a park to only the people within a block of it?
Look, my street is used as a through street and I hate it, but at the same time unless cars begin to consistently pose safety problems, there isn't much that can be done, and arguably should be done about it. Some go to fast, but on the whole most follow the posted limits . Even if they didn't, traffic calming measures would be more appropriate than cutting off access.
Once again, please state your opinions rationally instead of once sentence quips. Everything is a "fundamentally juvenile, silly idea" when summarized into a few words.
You used "a few words" when floating your idea, so...
Wanting to minimize traffic on a residential side street for the privacy and safety of its residents is a specific, justifiable reason for putting up a "No through traffic" sign. You might not like it but it meets your criteria.
The funny thing is, whether you're talking about speed bumps or Berkeley street dividers when talking about "traffic calming measures," a simple sign (and possible but unlikely consequences for not heeding the sign) might often be an infinitely more user friendly option for both the residents and the would-be shortcutters. Turning onto a street and discovering speed bumps or barriers sucks, and they suck even more if you have to live there.
I lived in Berkeley and the sign strikes me as a gentle first step to take before altering the streets. On the other hand, I'm really, really doubtful one solution or the other is going to be universally more effective. I don't think the "no through traffic" signs one sees where I live now would have worked in Berkeley, for example, even though they seem effective enough here. Different crowd, different traffic patterns.
It doesn't have to be illegal. A fake "no through traffic" sign might be illegal. But there is nothing wrong with: "Donkey carts may make frequent stops," or "Enjoy our street festival and parade every morning from 6 to 8 AM."
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I totally agree with the approach you've described.
Ticketing is only the first step, a temporary solution that highlights unacceptable (to local residents) traffic patterns to the local government.
Waze and its user are surfacing inefficiencies in how traffic patterns have been engineered. Though it'll take time for communities to plan and implement solutions, these are definitely solvable problems.
> "Though it'll take time for communities to plan and implement solutions"
By default yeah, but it doesn't have to! I think a lot of places get into a problem where perfect is the enemy of good - they hold off on traffic calming projects because of cost. Narrowing a road by constructing new sidewalks is expensive, after all.
But you don't need to do it perfectly - New York City redesigned vast portions of of its streets using nothing more than paint and traffic cones. No concrete needs to be poured nor streets torn up to get the process started - and even better, because these changes are fully reversible, they can often be implemented quickly without the usual multiple rounds of bureaucracy.
In NYC the redesign of many streets was simply done by the city, and kept permanently once the quantified results proved the efficacy of the setup. Easier to ask forgiveness (especially when you have hard data) than permission and all that.
> 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),
While I 100% agree with this, the other side is that often these streets have parking for the houses that is more utilized at night than during the day. So, while children are out in the summer, say, the streets are ~24' wide, but in the evening, with cars parked, become only 8'- 10'.
Firstly, parking lanes need to be marked - it's as simple as painting a line on the ground. Simply marking parking lanes will prevent the vast majority of drivers from attempting to drive in it.
Which goes back to the original point - you don't need to physically alter the street to modify driver behavior. People stay within the lines they've been assigned, but most suburban streets have an informal layout where parking and movement are mixed.
Secondly, curb extensions at intersections. This is where sidewalks jut "into" the street and are tremendously beneficial. It makes the the parking lanes useless for movement because you have to merge into the movement lanes at the intersection anyways. The narrowing of the street also has a proven awareness-increasing and speed-reducing effect. Even more, it shortens the distance for pedestrians to cross and dramatically reduces car-pedestrian collision rates - and also places people crossing the streets closer to the center of driver vision rather than peripherally.
>there were frequently people way over the speed limit
I agree that this is bad, but we don't have to appeal to safety or illegality to oppose this kind of through traffic.
I think as a resident of the street it's reasonable to expect drivers to stick to the main roads and leave your neighborhood alone.
I'm a fairly tolerant person, but a car driving down a street causes many unpleasant side effects: noise and pollution being the major ones. It also inconveniences pedestrians[1], kids, cats and squirrels who want to cross the road.
How would you enjoy sitting on the porch of your home if there were suddenly a river of traffic on the street?
[1] It bugs me how in North America pedestrians are seen as inconveniencing a driver if they are crossing the road, but not the other way around. We have our priorities the wrong way around.
As traffic density increases due to inevitable population rises, this first-world claim of "its my street and I want it quiet!" will have to give way to practicality. It takes years and $Millions to upgrade major roadways for ever-higher loads.
In my area the rich manage to get speed bumps, intersection blocks and one-way signs installed to protect their extra-special selves from the world. I kind of resent it.
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.
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.
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.
Got a crystal ball, eh? Don't worry, I'm acutely aware what a PITA any sort of street change is - just changing the designation of a 1-block residential street to a living street is Impossible (TM), and physically, that's just signage.
I'm not saying that street planning is easy, not at all. In my opinion, you seem to be saying "I understand street development, but I don't do software; therefore if the former is hard, the latter can't be hard (because world is somehow binary); plus it's Somebody Else's Problem now. Bam, problem solved! Magic!" - nope, you just moved the mess to a place it's harder to see.
Or in other words: is street design slow, because it takes a lot of time to repaint lanes and/or add a virtual barrier into the database, or is it slow because of all the non-technical issues surrounding it?
Actually I'm a software developer by day. Polish up that crystal ball.
I'm suggesting fixing the problem in the software because that's where the problem was created and where it stands a chance of being fixed. Street infrastructure cannot be changed fast enough to deal with temporary traffic problems. Attempting to do so would be ineffective.
The problem isn't that the road is closed/restricted.
The problem is that the app is telling people to use other roads that were not designed for such traffic. If not for the app, the majority of them would likely have stuck to major arteries that are meant to handle high traffic, but instead they are flooding into side streets and causing problems.
More succinctly, the problem is that the app encourages using the roads in ways that are inappropriate. It is abusive of the road network.
Not sure about that; I seem to recall the exact same situation in the 90s, before any apps: major street blocked, adjoining minor streets become clogged with cars trying to get around that.
But I think I see your point now: Waze amplifies the problem an order of magnitude. Still not sure that maintaining a list of "undesirable" streets is a good idea, but maybe discouraging the routing algorithm from taking side streets might work? (Seems to work around here - perhaps also a matter of map data quality?)
And that's the error, right there: software didn't create the problem of a closed/restricted road; trying to address the issue in-app means shooting the messenger.
>>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Your comment made me think about how Waze could direct many people on slightly sub-optimal routes to clear the main routes for some class of premium users.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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. :)
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.