271–280 of 582 posts
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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.
Isn't it illegal to park in front of a driveway in the US? At least, most of the places I've lived it's illegal.
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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.
Isn't it illegal to park in front of a driveway in the US? At least, most of the places I've lived it's illegal.
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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…
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.
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.
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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.
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 ti…
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 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…
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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.
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…
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.
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…
Palo Alto has a lot of these traffic calming measures and roadblocks to prevent traffic through local neighborhoods. Sometimes it can get out of hand. From http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/pub/nimby.html 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…
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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 (Tak…
The problem is people live 30 miles from work and come and go at the same time.
Agreed, sprawl is an issue.
> come and go at the same time.
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.