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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

#541

Post by gerbilly »

xenadu02 wrote: post #137
superuser2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10mph is blazingly, exceptionally fast for an interstate in a major city during commute hours. Building bigger highways sparks further-flung suburbs and the new traffic brings everyone else's commute times back to equilibrium.

Indeed, you can see this in the Dallas area. The major roads have run out of room to expand and according to the old timers traffic is no better than it was in 1990. All the road expansion did was let people move to ever more distant suburbs.

>All the road expansion did was let people move to ever more distant suburbs.

Yes, this is called 'induced demand.'[1] And I think that Waze may be planning its own obsolescense: once it has optimized all the streets and roads in a city, they will all be equally slow.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Elasticity_of_t...

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#542

Post by gerbilly »

joehewitt wrote: post #156

On Memorial Day I walked outside and did a double take - my quiet street, tucked away many turns from any main road, was backed up with cars from end to end. I'd never seen that before in 5 years here. Turned out it was Waze sending beachgoers (I'm still 30 minutes from the beach) on a side route to the nearest on ramp for the highway that heads to the coast. Within an hour there was a police car here diverting drive…

>What's frustrating is this "shortcut" was completely ineffective. It simply moved the traffic jam from the main roads to our tiny neighborhood.

This exemplifies the arrogance of 'disruptive companies' when they think they can improve on something like a traffic system or a taxi system.

They set out to make things more efficient without a deep understanding of the problem.

They see every problem as a technical optimization problem because they learned this kind of thing at school. However society has usually evolved a set of rules balancing the rights of various parties already.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#543

Post by alistairSH »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #177
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European cities are also extremely dense compared to American sprawl.

1. Bikes don't really depend on high density the way transit does. They don't do well in rural/exurban sprawl, true, but standard American suburbs are usually dense enough to make a good number of bike trips practical (the infrastructure is another matter entirely though). 2. Wikipedia says Oulu's urban density is 2300/sq mi, which is really not very dense at all. 3. In fact, apparently the suburb in the article (Tak…

This is true. I live on the other side of the river from Maryland and well outside the Beltway. The parts of the suburbs that are configured for cycling-as-transport get used year-round.

The only problem is the parts that are cycle-friendly aren't consistent. So, some neighborhoods are linked to commercial areas and others are not. I can easily ride the 11 miles to work without getting on any non-residential streets. But, there are areas 3 miles away that would require driving because of busy roads.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#544

Post by gerbilly »

voiper1 wrote: post #3

I actually recall this... 15 years ago, living parallel to a busy street. The various extra stop signs didn't keep people from using it. As @FroshKiller said though, it's not "my street". However, it was still a problem: there were frequently people way over the speed limit when we'd hardly expect it...

>there were frequently people way over the speed limit

I agree that this is bad, but we don't have to appeal to safety or illegality to oppose this kind of through traffic.

I think as a resident of the street it's reasonable to expect drivers to stick to the main roads and leave your neighborhood alone.

I'm a fairly tolerant person, but a car driving down a street causes many unpleasant side effects: noise and pollution being the major ones. It also inconveniences pedestrians[1], kids, cats and squirrels who want to cross the road.

How would you enjoy sitting on the porch of your home if there were suddenly a river of traffic on the street?

[1] It bugs me how in North America pedestrians are seen as inconveniencing a driver if they are crossing the road, but not the other way around. We have our priorities the wrong way around.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#545

Post by gerbilly »

I don't understand why so much of this thread is caught up on issues of what is legal, and what isn't, often citing that nobody 'owns' the street.

Isn't it a matter of being considerate?

Everybody knows that most rules in a society are implicit and unwritten.

To insist on only obeying the laws that are written in the most selfish way possible is to be intentionally, self-servingly, naïve.

We aren't robots, we are people. We live in a society, not a scenario out of a game theory textbook.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#546

Post by JoeAltmaier »

gerbilly wrote: post #544
voiper1 wrote: post #3

I actually recall this... 15 years ago, living parallel to a busy street. The various extra stop signs didn't keep people from using it. As @FroshKiller said though, it's not "my street". However, it was still a problem: there were frequently people way over the speed limit when we'd hardly expect it...

>there were frequently people way over the speed limit I agree that this is bad, but we don't have to appeal to safety or illegality to oppose this kind of through traffic. I think as a resident of the street it's reasonable to expect drivers to stick to the main roads and leave your neighborhood alone. I'm a fairly tolerant person, but a car driving down a street causes many unpleasant side effects: noise and pollut…

As traffic density increases due to inevitable population rises, this first-world claim of "its my street and I want it quiet!" will have to give way to practicality. It takes years and $Millions to upgrade major roadways for ever-higher loads.

In my area the rich manage to get speed bumps, intersection blocks and one-way signs installed to protect their extra-special selves from the world. I kind of resent it.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#547

Post by knodi123 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #538
knodi123 wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was responding to a guy who said "(Shrug) When I was a child, I was taught not to play in the street". I was talking about his attitude of placing responsibility on children, which you would know if you had actually read my comment. Seriously, read it again and show me where I said anything about childproofing the world.

Your emotional kneejerk comment that has nothing to do with what I wrote would surely be very popular on reddit, but this isn't that place, so I'll thank you to kindly stop speculating about what is in my mind and focus on what I actually typed.

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#548

Post by FroshKiller »

celticjames wrote: post #433
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…

Roads are subject to wear and tear. Higher traffic means more wear and thus more repairs. Repairs for most roads come out of municipal budgets. Municipal budgets are paid for by property taxes. The homeowners bought that road. So who's got an entitlement problem here?

The homeowners still, honestly. The homeowners don't pay higher taxes if their roads require more repairs. If anything, higher traffic on roads that frequently need repairs means lower property values, thus lower property taxes for those same homeowners.

Anyway, point being the homeowners did not buy that road. Previous generations of taxpayers paid for the construction of most roads, and the current generations of taxpayers are paying upkeep on all muni roads, not just the ones they live on.

Even if I agreed with you, most of the people taking residential detours are probably still local...which means they, too, paid for the roads!

Re: Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

#549

Post by FroshKiller »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #415
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…

> The city created a three-way stop before the curve that has slowed traffic on the street and seems to have reduced non-local traffic. How is this not the same NIMBY entitlement? "There are too many people using this public road, let's make it more arduous to use and let someone else suffer the traffic." That doesn't actually reduce traffic, it only redirects it. And if the people now receiving the traffic respond i…

It's pretty simple. NIMBY stands for "not in my backyard." The NIMBY bit of the complaint is "I don't want people driving down my street."

My concern about the traffic isn't NIMBY in nature because I don't care whether anyone drives down the street as long as they do it safely. So rather than "not in my backyard," it's "in my backyard is fine as long as you do it safely."

It isn't arduous to use the road, any redirected traffic is going back to the main streets meant to handle it, and jet fuel can and did melt those steel beams--not the three-way stop on my street.

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