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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

#241

Post by niels_olson »

FroshKiller wrote: post #2

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 th…

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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#242

Post by jimktrains2 »

justin66 wrote: post #237
jimktrains2 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#243

Post by S_A_P »

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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#244

Post by matwood »

mseebach wrote: post #84
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…

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 t…

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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#245

Post by _delirium »

plorkyeran wrote: post #240
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.

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

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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#246

Post by pnathan »

FroshKiller wrote: post #2

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 th…

> 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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#247

Post by akgerber »

holograham wrote: post #169
street wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 eve…

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.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/fighting-traffic

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#248

Post by justin66 »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #242
justin66 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toll roads are also a thing. The horror... The horror.

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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#249

Post by pnathan »

djrogers wrote: post #51
astrodust wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#250

Post by socalnate1 »

ciconia wrote: post #210
gooseus wrote: post #196

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 n…

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.
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