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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

#341

Post by greggman »

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 was told in Sweden all yards are publically usable and if someone wants to use "yours" you have to let them.

I only bring that up to point out a cultural difference that other cultures might see this differently

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101116164518A...

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#342

Post by skiningham »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #278
kqr2 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We don't actually have any information about whether that was folly or not. Let's say 2 children avoid a trip to the hospital over the next 5 years, but four thieves escape. That would be a perfectly acceptable compromise to me.

Suppose the ambulance has the same problem the police had.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#343

Post by Shivetya »

want them out of residential, speed humps are wonderful, not the little curb like bumps, I am talking the flat top type that you ride and down on.

been done in a few areas where I live when people started shortcutting on streets that were home to influential people. much more difficult to get into simple subdivisions though

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#344

Post by HillaryBriss »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #168
HillaryBriss wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was designed for a smaller number of single car drivers than it has today. And it was not designed for quick/cheap expansion. I guess any system of transportation would feel like torture for commuters if that system is overloaded and operating beyond its reasonable capacity.

So every major city in the US and Europe?

Don't know. Haven't visited every major city in the US and Europe.

One data point: As bad as it can be at times, especially on/near The Strip, Las Vegas still seems less congested than LA.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#345

Post by gjolund »

beachstartup wrote: post #126
gjolund wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LA traffic defies reason. I've hit gridlock at 3am on the 101 before. The whole city feels like it was designed to be some elaborate torture device for commuters.

it actually works great with less people. the problem is hitting that threshold requires regulation, which is a political impossibility except for special events. http://articles.latimes.com/1985-06-07/local/me-16088_1_traf... as for the 3am traffic, that was probably night time caltrans work, or a drunk driving accident :(

So less people driving leads to less traffic, what a surprise.

I think that LA takes pride in its traffic, like some kind of shared struggle.

It is the only city I have lived in that has an implied 30 minute allowance for traffic delays. Everyone understands and you can use the excuse anytime or day of the week.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#346

Post by dkhenry »

Yes what we should do is complain that people are starting to use side streets because no one plans on increased traffic when developers and homeowners are building mega suburbs. If you want sub-urban sprawl, but don't want to invest in infrastructure then your street should be over run with commuters.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#347

Post by balls187 »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #310
balls187 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not by anyone who understands how roads are paid for. Interestingly enough, WAZE does not pay for those roads.

And its users?

Point taken.

Should tobacco companies have any responsibility for the effects of it's products?

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#348

Post by HillaryBriss »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #252
HillaryBriss wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I view it a bit differently. Trading freedom for efficiency sometimes makes sense. I have to admit that governments force us to do all kinds of things, and I accept that, mostly. For me the debate is about which things the government can mandate. If turning three out of four lanes on LA's stretch of the 405 freeway into HOV lanes meant that commute times from the Valley to Culver City became a reliable 20 minutes, I…

If wishes were horses, we'd all ride; in reality, such broad changes tend to have various side effects, which are often unpleasant enough to obliterate the intended positive effect.

Sure. But LA's increasingly frequent and widespread gridlock also has serious negative effects.

Having government impose some new orderly process on a chaotic and inefficient transportation market (i.e. freeways) is not necessarily worse than the status quo.

LA is grappling with a serious mess. It's affecting the business climate significantly. People can't reliably and predictably get to their place of work. The unpleasant side effects are already here.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#349

Post by varjag »

iamdave wrote: post #93
revelation wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may own property on your street but that doesn't mean I can build a garbage incinerator on it. It's a zoning issue, and indeed there are already provisions that e.g. large trucks may not use some residential streets. Pouring more concrete is not the solution, it's a policy problem, particularly when rat runs are used to circumvent congestion charges. (That's not to say we shouldn't build more traffic calming for re…

I may own property on your street but that doesn't mean I can build a garbage incinerator on it. Maybe not, but I think the conceit here isn't about what you do on your property vs. utilization of public roads by...well...members of the public.

Here (Norway) municipality driveways within residential suburbs are designed based on amount of households and parking spots permitted in the area. Using them for huge amounts of through traffic would violate zoning rules and is plain unsafe.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#350

Post by skiningham »

ipsi wrote: post #258
astral303 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traffic calming hurts emergency service response. Ambulances have to slow down to a crawl thru this "calming." Buyer beware.

I believe that ambulances and especially fire trucks have a wider wheelbase than cars and vans do, so what I've seen in a number of places is speed humps that don't cover the entire road. They're wide enough that you can't avoid them with a car, but narrow enough that an ambulance or fire truck won't notice them. Or possibly it's for buses.

Where I live, the ambulances are just vans with modifications. I think the smaller-width speedbumps are either for busses or to cut costs.

I've also seen a police cruiser Crown Vic with lights and sirens take some speed "humps" at a surprisingly high rate of speed without issue.

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