Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war • Hacker News Board

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#531

Post by X-Istence » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 5:05 AM UTC

rconti wrote: post #498

Justsignedup wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed bumps help a lot. These are barriers made especially for making sure people are not speeding down these usually quiet streets. If people are speeding, surprise surprise cops are helpful. Towns need to work WITH waze not against it. I can imagine towns REALLY cranking up fines to use speeders on usually quiet streets (where kids may be playing) to ensure that the money flows into creating appropriate barriers.

Speed bumps suck. They're put there to intentionally increase wear and tear to cars and have minimal impact on traffic speeds. It's only accelerated the arms race to buy bigger and taller vehicles so that you can plow over speed bumps ever faster. There was a neighborhood where I grew up that had speed bumps in a neighborhood that were smoothest if you hit them at about 40mph. That did nothing but INCREASE traffic sp…

I once heard from a traffic engineer that certain speed bumps are made to be gone over at 20+ Mph faster than suggested so that ambulances and emergency personnel can travel over them with little to no trouble.

I've noticed this myself in certain areas, the speed bumps taken at higher speeds cause less issues, but it still of course increases wear and tear on motor vehicles, in most cases unnecessarily so.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#532

Post by ThrustVectoring » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 5:10 AM UTC

arthurdenture wrote: post #496

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed bumps usually kill more people by slowing down ambulances than they save by reducing vehicle speeds. The best way to keep a street quiet is to remove the cues that tell drivers that they can drive quickly. Narrow the street, remove the sidewalks, add trees and other visual noise to the margins, and remove lane markings. Replacing asphalt with gravel can also help (and is cheaper to maintain). You don't need to…

> Speed bumps usually kill more people by slowing down ambulances than they save by reducing vehicle speeds. I don't think you're going to find research to support that. At least, I couldn't. http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6419/do-speed-bu... has some interesting discussion of it. I'm a big fan of the other advice, though, about changing the road design to discourage speeding.

Thanks for the link - apparently I need to flag "things I vaguely remember being as facts I read at some point" as "possibly an urban legend".

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#533

Post by bartvk » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 5:28 AM UTC

spuz wrote: post #463

tomphoolery wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that doesn't mean that all streets should be maximally employed to reduce that congestion. It does, actually, because all streets are connected and part of the same network. No matter what philosophy you subscribe to as to what the "goal" of suburban neighborhood planning is, the fact remains that since (almost) all streets are (eventually) connected, and thus the problem of lots of cars being able to drive on stre…

The opposite of this is also a viable option in some cases. Create a shared road space where there is no delineation between sidewalk and roadway and pedestrians maintain right of way. It is a planning solution used in some city centres [1] I remember watching a programme about how they introduced this on a busy city centre road and weirdly it increased traffic flow while also allowing more pedestrian traffic (presum…

Here in Utrecht, The Netherlands, we have something similar. Asphalt that's red in color, usually means "cycling lane". But some roads are completely red, with signs saying "cars are guest users".

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#534

Post by brbsix » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 5:51 AM UTC

I really wish Google Maps wouldn't be pushing these reroutes by default. A friend was pulled over a few days ago in a small town off the Interstate (the sort of place with bored LE) and got embroiled in all sorts of legal nonsense thanks to this "feature". There's only one obvious route (and I know it well), so I couldn't figure out how she was "caught up" in the aforementioned city. She said Google Maps had redirected her off the Interstate and that she had spent 40 minutes driving back roads. I didn't believe her.

The next day I was driving as she played navigator with her phone. It was a highway route that I know well. Several times it redirected us around "slowdowns" and (what it referred to as) construction. Out of curiosity due to the prior events, I begrudgingly obliged it's instructions. It was completely nonsensical... Not only did it not save time, but it added a whole new dimension of additional stress driving through unfamiliar, unsigned, back roads.

I don't know that I feel comfortable using or recommending the current incarnation of Google Maps navigation to others. It's great and all when you already know exactly where and how you're going someplace. The traffic estimates can be invaluable. However until they scale back this rerouting business, I'd be really weary of using it any further. There are plenty of decent "dumb" navigation apps that won't fuck you like this.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#535

Post by kalleboo » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 5:52 AM UTC

HillaryBriss wrote: post #30

paulddraper wrote: post #4

If it's faster to take a neighborhood street than the interstate , there's a problem. It's not normal. It sounds like residents are at war with transportation infrastructure instead.

There seems to be a new reality, a new problem with population growth and GDP fetishism: GDP rises with the number of people participating in the economy, true. But GDP and accompanying tax revenues don't rise enough . Infrastructure becomes overloaded and the government fails to expand capacity sufficiently. Tax revenues rise somewhat, but, again, not enough to pay for the necessary expansion. Traffic gets worse. On…

> One solution would be to literally force everyone to take high efficiency, high density modes of transportation

One example of this put into practice is in Singapore, where you bid for one of a limited number of 10-year Certificate of Entitlements to own a car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_Entitlement

In many cities in Japan, you have to show proof of access to a parking spot to register a car, which limits the amount of cars to the amount of residential parking lots.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#536

Post by brbsix » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 6:10 AM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #465

> For one thing, the system knows if you’re not actually in motion. More important, it constantly self-corrects, based on data from other drivers. > “The nature of crowdsourcing is that if you put in a fake accident, the next 10 people are going to report that it’s not there,” said Julie Mossler, Waze’s head of communications. This sounds like something solvable with a farm of Android VMs and fake location data. Get…

I assume Waze is monitoring the entire duration of your travel (while you have it on at least). It should be fairly easy to identify users who stay within the 0.25mi radius of one neighborhood and/or never exceed 20mph.

There is an 'Allow mock locations' toggle in developer options, though applications can detect that it's been enabled. Xposed framework can prevent that however.

Perhaps some community will start a crowdsource fund to hire a developer to implement such a system? Or go low-tech and crowdsource real users, paying $n per false report.

They could also take a page from the residents of Beachwood Canyon (near the Hollywood sign in LA) who petitioned their council member to arrange a deal with Garmin and Google Maps. http://gizmodo.com/why-people-keep-trying-to-erase-the-holly...

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#537

Post by Dr_tldr » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 6:45 AM UTC

shivsta wrote: post #461

Dr_tldr wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication that people who have more knowledge about a local area have more right to publicly maintained resources than those who don't is even more troubling. Maintaining unequal access to public resources is a form of corruption, discrimination, or both. A traffic engineer whose designs are only effective when there's information asymmetry is either A) dealing with impossible project restraints/requirements B)…

I agree that all information should be free for everyone, but your assessment is too harsh. Impossible projects are probably pretty common in many dense cities.

100% agree, it's usually not the fault of the engineers. But in a better system, they wouldn't face political pressure to tell people that indefinite growth without inconvenience or long term investment is possible.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#538

Post by CamperBob2 » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 7:12 AM UTC

knodi123 wrote: post #527

jimmywanger wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're conflating two notions. One of a "penalty" which is something that is inflicted, and one of "consequences" which just happen. Children who aren't taught money management and nutrition will end up having shorter and worse lives on the average. Is that a consequence or a penalty?

Clearly the children aren't being intentionally murdered in order to punish their parents. That's so far from reality that there's no sense pointing out that I'm wrong. I would have written "death consequence", but that doesn't roll as trippingly off of the tongue. Try not to read the subtext instead of focusing on a legal interpretation. The whole point of my comment was that it's the children who suffer when a pare…

Then, there are those of us who don't want to live (or drive) in a world that's been childproofed to the extent you probably have in mind.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#539

Post by Piskvorrr » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 8:21 AM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #462

lsllc wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I often ignore it -- Waze really over-optimizes; you end up going left-right-left-right down narrow streets just to save a minute. Mostly, I'd rather sit in the traffic on the main thoroughfare and just chill out listening to music or the radio. Not to mention, the increased mileage, wear and tear and fuel consumption from the back roads and constant turns (and disrupting otherwise quiet neighborhoods). Waze…

+1, that's a big pet peeve of mine with respect to all turn-by-turn apps I've ever used. Most of them provide check boxes to avoid toll roads, highways, ferries and drawbridges, and the like. Why in the world don't they offer an option to avoid left turns?

Significantly harder to implement, simple as that. Would be useful though.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#540

Post by Piskvorrr » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 8:25 AM UTC

breischl wrote: post #159

breischl wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I'm a software developer by day. Polish up that crystal ball. I'm suggesting fixing the problem in the software because that's where the problem was created and where it stands a chance of being fixed. Street infrastructure cannot be changed fast enough to deal with temporary traffic problems. Attempting to do so would be ineffective.

The problem isn't that the road is closed/restricted. The problem is that the app is telling people to use other roads that were not designed for such traffic. If not for the app, the majority of them would likely have stuck to major arteries that are meant to handle high traffic, but instead they are flooding into side streets and causing problems. More succinctly, the problem is that the app encourages using the ro…

Not sure about that; I seem to recall the exact same situation in the 90s, before any apps: major street blocked, adjoining minor streets become clogged with cars trying to get around that.

But I think I see your point now: Waze amplifies the problem an order of magnitude. Still not sure that maintaining a list of "undesirable" streets is a good idea, but maybe discouraging the routing algorithm from taking side streets might work? (Seems to work around here - perhaps also a matter of map data quality?)