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Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#231

Post by chrisdbaldwin »

yAak wrote: post #160

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 th…

Google/Alphabet purchased Waze at some point, and they use Waze's tech in Google Maps.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#232

Post by RichardCA »

tbyehl wrote: post #133
danra wrote: post #73

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…

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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#233

Post by matt-attack »

edward wrote: post #230

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.

Yes, some time ago, I had postulated this would happen. I see it as a new form of revenue for Waze.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#234

Post by enoch_r »

oh_sigh wrote: post #199
oftenwrong wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Berkeley solution has the advantage that it doesn't hurt the utility of walking and cycling.

But it does negatively affect some home prices while positively affecting other home prices.

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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#235

Post by awm »

enjo wrote: post #145
warcher wrote: post #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 .

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 pe…

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 :-/

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#236

Post by Spooky23 »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #34
mikeash wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#237

Post by justin66 »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #200
Declanomous wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But if it's a road paid for with public money, how can use like this be restricted?

Toll roads are also a thing.

The horror... The horror.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#238

Post by protomyth »

knieveltech wrote: post #173
ctdonath wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alas if they'd only left out the word "militia"...

Militia had a specific meaning to the founders. Alas, if people today would study what the words they used actually meant.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#239

Post by Spooky23 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #183
e40 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#240

Post by plorkyeran »

oftenwrong wrote: post #163
_delirium wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cul-de-sacs could easily be built with connecting bike/pedestrian pathways if that was something the developers actually cared about.
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