Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 582 posts

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#331

Post by chongli »

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.

Why should the locals have to pay? What we need is a system of license-plate-reading cameras with automated ticketing to bring up the enforcement of No Thru Traffic signs to near 100%. Then, if Waze routed a hundred cars through a neighbourhood they'd all end up paying $100 fines, bringing in a big stream of revenue to the city and discouraging the use of the app.

Perhaps even more practical would be a law to allow the residents themselves to set up and maintain the system in exchange for a cut of the ticket revenue for their neighbourhood!

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#332

Post by mikeash »

ellyagg wrote: post #255
mikeash wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There certainly are cases like this. There's one little town I drive through sometimes which for a long time dropped the speed limit directly from 55MPH to 35MPH coming into town, and where the 35MPH limit sign was hidden behind a tree until you were about 3ft away from it. In what I am sure is a complete coincidence, this town has a $200 fine for speeding above the state penalty. Thankfully I never got hit with it,…

I've obeyed dozens of "No turn on red" signs in my life, but I rarely see "No thru traffic" signs and until this thread, didn't really understand what the point of them was. I'm surely not hyper-vigilant about spotting and obeying them. You could blame me for this, or we could ponder the implications of the different probabilities of various sign types being obeyed, and whether high rates of disobedience might indica…

You don't need to understand the point, you just need to comprehend and obey.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that a law which is frequently broken may be a bad law, but "reading and obeying traffic signs" is not a particularly high bar to clear. If such signs get ignored, it's because the average driver is horrendous at driving. The only solutions to that are vastly better driver training and testing than we have now, or autonomous cars.

I'm not sure there is a high rate of disobedience here, though. The article seems to be talking about places where such laws don't exist, although the residents may try to change that.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#333

Post by cmurf »

Jacqued wrote: post #254
cmurf wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> neighborhoods who didn't voluntarily agree to increased traffic just to make my commute shorter, this is free loading and their roads are for them to get to and from their home It's nothing against you but is this a common opinion in the US? People in neighborhoods "own" the streets? As a Frenchman saying this is astonishing as I would naturally consider that I do own the street just as much as they do and it's my…

Speaking for myself, my logic doesn't consider the neighborhood roads owned by the neighborhood. I consider it public, and as such I don't think cutting through the neighborhood is illegal. I just consider it something almost like pissing in a swimming pool. They aren't asking for this extra traffic and it is after all their neighborhood. I wouldn't like it happening in mine either.

What we should have is better infrastructure on the main roads. The whole point is that they go faster than neighborhood side streets; and if that's not working then something isn't right. More or better public transit, more or better bike friendly roads, homes closer to work or telecommute. Or maybe the cauliflower neighborhood design, where basically the neighborhood is a maze, there's a mandatory 90 degree right or left turn ever 3 blocks, so it's totally pointless to use such a neighborhood for rat running. And it's not super expensive to retrofit a neighborhood this way; certainly it's more pedestrian and cyclist friendly. Plus it also slows people down automatically, no one is going to rip a 90 degree right going 20mph.

So you take all the acrimony, regulations, fines, speed bumps, dips, ugly signage away and just design the thing to be driven the way the neighborhood wants, and not designed for rat running.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#334

Post by sedachv »

Jacqued wrote: post #254
cmurf wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> neighborhoods who didn't voluntarily agree to increased traffic just to make my commute shorter, this is free loading and their roads are for them to get to and from their home It's nothing against you but is this a common opinion in the US? People in neighborhoods "own" the streets? As a Frenchman saying this is astonishing as I would naturally consider that I do own the street just as much as they do and it's my…

> It's nothing against you but is this a common opinion in the US? People in neighborhoods "own" the streets?

Yes. In many suburban neighborhoods (especially predominantly white ones) people will give you dirty looks if you are a stranger walking around. If you are black many white people will call the police.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#335

Post by tormeh »

zippergz wrote: post #304
Jacqued wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> neighborhoods who didn't voluntarily agree to increased traffic just to make my commute shorter, this is free loading and their roads are for them to get to and from their home It's nothing against you but is this a common opinion in the US? People in neighborhoods "own" the streets? As a Frenchman saying this is astonishing as I would naturally consider that I do own the street just as much as they do and it's my…

Portraying this as a sense of "owning" the street is unneccessarily perjorative, IMHO. I don't think that many people would argue with the idea that, all else being equal, having less traffic on the street in front of your house is a good thing. Less noise, less polution, less risk of pets and children getting hit by cars. So it shouldn't be surprising that people dislike it when traffic in front of their houses incr…

I think the point was more along the lines of "you don't get to appropriate the road that I helped fund with tax money and that belongs to everyone". I support that, actually. If it's a public road and I drive legally and responsibly then there's no problem. Just because your house is big doesn't mean that it's a farm where all surrounding land belongs to you.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#336

Post by oftenwrong »

pixl97 wrote: post #201
oftenwrong wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Streets are not just paths for cars to pass-through on. They are a part of the places we live. They should be safe even for playing children. Cars can pass through cautiously, allowing children to move out of the way. It's not hard to share the space.

>It's not hard to share the space. It is easy to share a pie between two people. It is very hard to share a pie between 400 people. In the US roads ARE NOT designed as a shared space between people and cars. If you play in the road you could very well die due to one person on a phone when they shouldn't be. Stay alive, keep off the road.

>In the US roads ARE NOT designed as a shared space between people and cars.

That's the problem. Kids cannot safely play in the street in many "safe" neighborhoods in the US. They should be able to, but they can't. Americans practically worship cars. The roads are treated like sacred land. Safety and happiness are set aside for the sake of motoring.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#337

Post by Grishnakh »

pjlegato wrote: post #207
arebop wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think it would be better if it were a dendritic system? It's hard to believe that e.g., randomly walling off half of those grid links would make traffic better.

I doubt it. It won't fix the fundamental problem of moving lots of people to where they want to go in the city. You can only do that by making the area undesirable to go to for whatever reason (probably not a good option), or by providing some alternate means of getting places. Unfortunately, due to the sprawling way LA is laid out, all of the other options are even worse than driving there. In a dense area like Manh…

The best way to fix it would be to build SkyTran. It's even being developed not that far away at the NASA Ames Research Center.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#338

Post by mikeash »

drewcrawford wrote: post #317
mikeash wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could just be about quantity, not groups. If only locals do it, that's a relatively small amount of traffic. If outsiders join in, that could be orders of magnitude more. I do agree with the overall point. If your local road is an attractive route and people use it to go places, don't blame the messenger. But it doesn't have to be about tribalism.

Of course it is necessarily about tribalism. If it were not we could just install an access gate that limits the throughput of the road to X cars per hour (without regard to whether you live on it or not) and consider the problem resolved. But a homeowner would oppose having an equal share with any other citizen for a road on which they live. Or, to see this the other way: consider a driver shrouded in a veil of igno…

Your access gate solution doesn't work because the impact on different drivers is dramatically unequal. If a cross-town commuter can't use that road then he might lose a minute or two of his time. If a resident can't use that road then he can't go home.

Of course your hypothetical driver would choose to take the shortcut when shrouded from the knowledge that it's his road. It's a classic tragedy of the commons. Much of the purpose of traffic laws like these is to avert tragedies of the commons.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#339

Post by arprocter »

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…

Irony being that without private transportation a lot of US suburbs would be unlivable in the first place

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#340

Post by HillaryBriss »

xraystyle wrote: post #228
HillaryBriss wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Los Angeles the policy is just to parking-ticket the hell out of drivers at every opportunity. The 'unofficial' policy of parking enforcement here is to ticket everything you see, regardless of whether or not the car is actually in violation of something. They know it's far cheaper for drivers to just pay the fines than it is to fight the tickets. Arguing a parking ticket can literally take several entire days. Fo…

Yes. And since those actually are city infractions, LA truly does rake in the cash on parking tickets.
Post reply on HN