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

Waze Hijacked L.A. in the Name of Convenience

lamag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 61 posts

Re: Waze Hijacked L.A. in the Name of Convenience

#11

Post by PaulHoule »

I grew up in Southern Hew Hampshire, one of the sprawliest places in the U.S.

The architectural principle of Southern NH is that streets are not organized in a grid but rather in a hierarchy. They add more suburban "pods" at the leaf nodes with resulting uncontrollable traffic increases at upper levels.

A street grid scales in an entirely different way in that if you build more grid you add both short- and long-range access at the same time.

A town I live near added "traffic calming" measures, in some cases draconian. (e.g. When the cop catches you turning towards the supermarket when you shouldn't be you tell him that you're entirely confused by the streets in the area, you blow 0.0, and he says he is confused by it too.)

As soon as traffic calming went into place, traffic got much worse on nearby arteries, particularly wait times at street lights.

My current theory is that a good traffic route avoids stop lights like the plague. It's inevitable that you will hit stop lights, wasting your time and fuel. If you go to places where traffic concentrates, traffic will eventually outflow the ability of cars to clear the intersection during the green cycle. So a single traffic light causes you to be stuck for several cycles.

If you think for yourself you realize that you can clear 10 stop sign intersections in the time that you can clear a bad pair of lights.

I don't apologize for any of this behavior because I am making life better for people in the herd by getting out of it.

Re: Waze Hijacked L.A. in the Name of Convenience

#12

Post by Mtinie »

jcranmer wrote: post #9
koboll wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to understand how merely directing people toward a certain street amounts to encouraging reckless driving.

For one thing, Waze is using the actual speed of drivers instead of the legal speed limit to determine the travel time of a route. If drivers are speeding, Waze is basing its time savings on drivers violating the law. In some of the conditions that are brought up in these stories, it's not even really safe to travel the legal speed limit. (And reckless driving includes travelling too fast for conditions). Given the r…

Are you sure about that, if the speed is moving greater than the posted limit? Waze displays your current speed as a green/red value compared against the posted speed.

I can’t imagine they’d use absolute herd speed as the baseline against the projected speeds of the herd’s speed was a greater value.

Re: Waze Hijacked L.A. in the Name of Convenience

#13

Post by solveit »

jcranmer wrote: post #9
koboll wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to understand how merely directing people toward a certain street amounts to encouraging reckless driving.

For one thing, Waze is using the actual speed of drivers instead of the legal speed limit to determine the travel time of a route. If drivers are speeding, Waze is basing its time savings on drivers violating the law. In some of the conditions that are brought up in these stories, it's not even really safe to travel the legal speed limit. (And reckless driving includes travelling too fast for conditions). Given the r…

I strenuously object to the idea that the government should be able to stop the spreading of publicly available truths in the name of public safety, especially over a justification as flimsy as "encourages reckless driving". I would be willing to revisit this debate when somebody figures out how to build nuclear weapons in their garage, not so much before that.

Re: Waze Hijacked L.A. in the Name of Convenience

#14

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

jcranmer wrote: post #9
koboll wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to understand how merely directing people toward a certain street amounts to encouraging reckless driving.

For one thing, Waze is using the actual speed of drivers instead of the legal speed limit to determine the travel time of a route. If drivers are speeding, Waze is basing its time savings on drivers violating the law. In some of the conditions that are brought up in these stories, it's not even really safe to travel the legal speed limit. (And reckless driving includes travelling too fast for conditions). Given the r…

> If drivers are speeding, Waze is basing its time savings on drivers violating the law.

Have you ever tried driving 65 when everyone else does 80 (and the law says 65 mph)? It's borderline reckless to do so. All sorts of people will be passing you, creating unnecessary merges and lane switching that decreases road safety conditions.

Re: Waze Hijacked L.A. in the Name of Convenience

#15

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

The problem isn't Waze. It's the sprawl and failure of urban planning. More dense, more mixed use development is what LA needs. Less cars implies less traffic. Make cities walkable. But, it is too late for that. Homeowners have decided carte blanche to oppose new development. This is the price they pay. LA will never return to being a city with one-tenth its current population, where every family gets a 6,000 square foot lot, a car and 2.1 kids. Plan for it.

Re: Waze Hijacked L.A. in the Name of Convenience

#16

Post by PeterisP »

jcranmer wrote: post #9
koboll wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to understand how merely directing people toward a certain street amounts to encouraging reckless driving.

For one thing, Waze is using the actual speed of drivers instead of the legal speed limit to determine the travel time of a route. If drivers are speeding, Waze is basing its time savings on drivers violating the law. In some of the conditions that are brought up in these stories, it's not even really safe to travel the legal speed limit. (And reckless driving includes travelling too fast for conditions). Given the r…

Waze doesn't tell you what speed to drive. It just gives you a direction, and you're literally at the steering wheel. If you're breaking any limits, it warns you, quite loudly by default.

However, it does give a reasonable ETA based on real world traffic conditions, and that's a good thing - if today on some street everybody's driving at 10mph then it doesn't matter if it's because of a traffic jam or unsafe icy road, Waze won't send me there.

Re: Waze Hijacked L.A. in the Name of Convenience

#17

Post by enoch_r »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #14
jcranmer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one thing, Waze is using the actual speed of drivers instead of the legal speed limit to determine the travel time of a route. If drivers are speeding, Waze is basing its time savings on drivers violating the law. In some of the conditions that are brought up in these stories, it's not even really safe to travel the legal speed limit. (And reckless driving includes travelling too fast for conditions). Given the r…

> If drivers are speeding, Waze is basing its time savings on drivers violating the law. Have you ever tried driving 65 when everyone else does 80 (and the law says 65 mph)? It's borderline reckless to do so. All sorts of people will be passing you, creating unnecessary merges and lane switching that decreases road safety conditions.

This is true for freeways and possibly multi lane arterials. It's absolutely not true for small neighborhood streets, which seem to be the shortcuts at issue here.

Re: Waze Hijacked L.A. in the Name of Convenience

#18

Post by enoch_r »

jedmeyers wrote: post #6
koboll wrote: post #3

>This has created fascinating potential legal issues that may one day be litigated in lawsuits or class actions. These thousands of homeowners and renters have arguably been injured by Waze’s and Google’s successful privatization of formerly public streets. So it's illegal to tell people that a public road might make for a faster route than the one a person is currently driving on? It seems like the real problem here…

> non-residents can't cut through them. Non-residents shouldn’t pay taxes to maintain those roads either then.

Streets have many purposes. They allow people to access their homes. They provide parking. They are bike routes, walking routes, scooter routes, running routes, skateboard routes, and driving routes. They are sometimes even places kids can play, or at least where parents can feel safe biking with their kids, or where one can easily and safely cross the street as a pedestrian.

Not letting vehicles cut through a neighborhood street means the street serves one fewer purpose, but it means it serves every other purpose much better than before. Maybe it's worth it for some streets, maybe it's not for others. But your statement is a bit like saying you shouldn't need to pay taxes to maintain a school because you're not allowed to drive through it.

Re: Waze Hijacked L.A. in the Name of Convenience

#19

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

enoch_r wrote: post #17
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If drivers are speeding, Waze is basing its time savings on drivers violating the law. Have you ever tried driving 65 when everyone else does 80 (and the law says 65 mph)? It's borderline reckless to do so. All sorts of people will be passing you, creating unnecessary merges and lane switching that decreases road safety conditions.

This is true for freeways and possibly multi lane arterials. It's absolutely not true for small neighborhood streets, which seem to be the shortcuts at issue here.

It seems improbable, though, that Waze is assuming you're doing 65 mph on residential streets (which, presumably, are around 25mph legal limit) to save time.

It's faster to take residential streets if the freeways are completely backed up to the point they're moving slower.

Re: Waze Hijacked L.A. in the Name of Convenience

#20

Post by PeterisP »

A nice quote from the article - "The mayor spoke proudly of this shining example of the city’s “data initiative,” and how the Waze partnership would “get people where they want to go, faster.”" followed by a dissatisfaction that it did not result in people getting sent to the roadways that the traffic planners wanted to.

Guess what, people would absolutely get sent to the major roadways if (and only if!) those roadways would actually get people where they want to go, faster. If those roadways suck compared to the alternatives, then that points towards a duty of the major to improve those major roadways (which are obviously overwhelmed even after Waze helps by redirecting some traffic off of them), not a duty to drivers to simply suffer every day while sitting in a traffic jam on the "gov't recommended" route or the likes of Waze to keep mum about better alternatives.

The article mentions the 'LA Complete Streets Official Guide' listing which streets the planners designated as arterial vs non-arterial - guess what, if there's a mismatch between the plan and how people can reach their destinations most efficiently, then it is the plan that's wrong and needs to change, not the drivers. If you plan and build a wider, "faster" arterial route that's actually a huge diversion and drivers take shortcuts instead of following your route, well, too bad you wasted a bunch of money building a road noone needs based on a bad plan, it's not the fault of drivers that this road doesn't suit their needs.

The city was free to use its partnership with Waze to determine where to build(improve/widen/regulate) roads and intersections that would be a better fit for how people want to travel. However, instead of listening to the people through that data, they wanted to use it to tell people how to get where they want to be in a way that suits interests of city planners instead of the driver - and that's not how it works.

Post reply on HN