191–200 of 582 posts
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.
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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I still see lots of people who are willing to disregard these signs, though. For example on Channing at Roosevelt I see people cut through daily. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8647438,-122.2756017,3a,75y,...
Good lord that looks awful. I would cut that every day, too, instead of having to circle around four blocks just to move ten feet.
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 someth…
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.
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.
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I got a ticket for one of these types of things, some local ordinance prohibiting through traffic during rush hour. It's a great revenue generator for the local PDs. Lots of one-off traffic laws that people passing through won't (and really, can't) know about.
"No Thru Traffic" signs are enforceable!? What law does that fall under?
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.
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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…
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.
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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 thro…
The Berkeley solution has the advantage that it doesn't hurt the utility of walking and cycling.
> 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?
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.