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Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

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Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ci…

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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#83
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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#84
post #21
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 equipmen…

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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#85

This quote seems very telling: > 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…

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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#86
post #17

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.…

[deleted]

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#87
post #28

If a route is more efficient, but people don't want it to be, the solution is traffic calming, not hiding the right of way from maps.

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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 blo…

>London, Paris, Rome - all have a gasp workable public transport (can't speak for Shanghai or MC), dwarfing the vehicular traffic

Yet they still have crippling rush-hour gridlocks.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to rush hour in every major city.

...in America (where cities are actually built for cars and people are just annoying, barely tolerated parasites).

People are in those cars, just because you use a car doesn't mean you are not a person.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#90
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.

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