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

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#491

Post by msandford » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 12:40 AM UTC

hakanensari wrote: post #476

spuz wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"By creating a greater sense of uncertainty and making it unclear who has priority, drivers will reduce their speed." - so un-binary and fascinating.

There's a lot of science behind the idea: http://jalopnik.com/5533260/why-street-signs-make-traffic-mo...

http://thecityfix.com/blog/naked-streets-without-traffic-lig...

http://www.wired.com/2004/12/traffic/

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#492

Post by FireBeyond » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 12:47 AM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #467

FireBeyond wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does your average driver know that the traffic control signage is official when the residents are putting up their own privately owned signs for traffic control? If they have to 'err on the side of caution', then the residents win, despite having no legal right.

I'm pretty sure there are laws against posting fake signs on government-maintained roads.

And yet here's someone proudly, in national media no less, saying he does exactly that...

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#493

Post by sedachv » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 12:52 AM UTC

thesis wrote: post #383

sedachv wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Wow.. what? Do you have any data to back that up? I don't, but from personal experience I have never seen police stopping black people in my neighborhood who are walking around.

Take for example Oakland, which used to have a large African-American population. Now that a lot of white people have moved in and started calling the police on blacks, some parents are afraid to let their African-American children walk around on the streets by themselves: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/racial-profiling-via-n...

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#494

Post by int_handler » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 12:59 AM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #468

FroshKiller wrote: post #2

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…

In my view, the "entitlement" card can be played on anybody, which makes it meaningless. For instance, "Nobody owns this street, so I can do whatever I want with it," could be portrayed as being equally entitled.

So, exercising the right to use a public street within the bounds of the law is considered entitlement?

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#495

Post by rconti » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 1:09 AM UTC

treebeard901 wrote: post #472

FireBeyond wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile maybe two children die in drowning incidents because fire engines and ambulances aren't able to effectively navigate your makeshift 'traffic abatement' program. How's your compromise now?

Suppose the two children were the thieves and the traffic abatement program let them get away from the police.

Suppose a spherical child in a vacuum

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#496

Post by arthurdenture » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 1:15 AM UTC

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #481

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 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.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#497

Post by brbsix » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 1:15 AM UTC

jo909 wrote: post #282

GVIrish wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That said, 5 minutes per ticket pretty much requires offenders to present themselves in a nice, orderly line. Officers get exactly that when they set up shop in a place where they know there are going to be plenty of violators. Highway 66 inside of the DC beltway is HOV during rush hour. The police will just sit at the end of the on ramp and write tickets for everyone trying to cheat HOV or with expired tags or ins…

I kind of want my police force to do their controls in the most efficient manner, to catch the most violators with the least amount of manpower. (Of course supplemented with an element of surprise.) No real reason to make a DUI checkpoint in the end of a cul-de-sac, is there?

Unless they're doing the wrong things (e.g. warrantless surveillance, civil asset forfeiture) in which case that efficiency starts to look quite terrifying.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#498

Post by rconti » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 1:15 AM UTC

Justsignedup wrote: post #473

FroshKiller wrote: post #2

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…

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 speeds (myself included).

We've got speed bumps in our neighborhood. They suck, and people just speed over them anyway.

Ditto using stop signs as traffic calming measures. YAY, let's increase air pollution (fuel burnt), increase noise pollution (accelerating and braking vehicles), increase water pollution (brake dust and other byproducts) and waste everyone's goddamned time by making every single car come to a stop (regardless of cross traffic or pedestrians) just so that some NIMBY can think SOMETHING WAS DONE.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#499

Post by tetromino_ » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 1:16 AM UTC

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #469

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…

There's an important difference between streets (paved surfaces within a built-up area) and roads (an improved path connecting two points). They're different things with different purposes. The goal of streets is to enable valuable economic activity between the people and property on it, while the goal of a road is to connect separate economic areas. If you close a street to vehicles, it's still valuable, since you c…

> replace the asphalt with gravel when it starts needing repairs. Seriously. It's both cheaper and discourages through traffic.

... at the expense of being impassable for road bikes, generating vast clouds of dust (fun for pedestrians), high noise levels (fun for the local residents), being a major pain to plow in the winter, and having the occasional rock spraying from under a tyre damaging paint or smashing someone's windshield.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#500

Post by ghaff » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 1:19 AM UTC

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #469

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…

There's an important difference between streets (paved surfaces within a built-up area) and roads (an improved path connecting two points). They're different things with different purposes. The goal of streets is to enable valuable economic activity between the people and property on it, while the goal of a road is to connect separate economic areas. If you close a street to vehicles, it's still valuable, since you c…

>replace the asphalt with gravel when it starts needing repairs

And throws up a lot of dust and needs to be continuously patched and graded for potholes and washboarding. It can also get ripped to shreds by snowplows if the ground isn't hard frozen. (And even then a lot of material can be scraped off if the snowplow operator isn't good.)

Source: Have a gravel driveway and my family has a house on a fairly long private gravel road.