Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war

> "But the plans were on display..."

> "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

> "That's the display department."

> "With a flashlight."

> "Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

> "So had the stairs."

> "But look, you found the notice didn't you?"

> "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"

At the very least, it might be paying for itself....

I don't know why you'd think it couldn't be greater than the cost, either. It takes, what, five minutes to write a ticket, which might average $100? That's $1,200/hour of revenue. No way the officer costs that much, even including benefits and equipment. Most people just pay tickets, they don't contest them, so court costs will be small.

economies of scale!

21461. (a) It is unlawful for a driver of a vehicle to fail to obey a sign or signal defined as regulatory in the federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, or a Department of Transportation approved supplement to that manual of a regulatory nature erected or maintained to enhance traffic safety and operations or to indicate and carry out the provisions of this code or a local traffic ordinance or resolution adopted pursuant to a local traffic ordinance, or to fail to obey a device erected or maintained by lawful authority of a public body or official.

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.

At a glance, it looked like a state police cruiser.

(I'm a U.S. suburban Dad with 2 young kids who do stupid things on their bikes.)

Meanwhile, access for emergency vehicles can be pretty important for the rest of us.

A traffic engineer whose designs are only effective when there's information asymmetry is either

A) dealing with impossible project restraints/requirements B) terrible at their job

It is worth framing this homeowners Waze sabotage as a NIMBY problem, because if the cars aren't being routed through their neighborhood, then it's being routed through someone else's neighborhood. The consequence of unequal distribution of traffic burden means that some people shoulder more burden because they lost in some conflict or competition, whether that's the war of politics or not having enough money or whatever.

There should at least be the empty-handed gesture of discussing why other (poor) people should shoulder disproportionate burden.

If people aren't discussing a substantial global reduction in vehicles, a revolutionary new transportation method without the same issues, or a decline in US population that outpaces growth, then they're talking in code about pushing the problem to somebody else.

> I'm all for utilization of public infrastructure, but I'm also sympathetic to the homeowners who observe the safety of their neighborhoods decrease as a result of increased traffic volume.

I for one have zero sympathy for people who put up street signs on their own saying no through fare. Personally, I'd say that is a criminal offense.

I have zero sympathy for home owners who think their rights extend to the streets.

There are other ways to increase safety. Stop signs, speed bumps (sparingly!), very low speed limits (I'd say less than 20 mph) are all low hanging fruits.

No, you should not play on the streets every day. Block parties and such that happen infrequently (think once a month and probably only for a few hours) won't be a problem. However, people who say no through fare on their street are guilty of NIMBY.

I find it hilarious that NIMBYs would complain about noise, when they hire gas-operated lawnmowers to keep their lawns tidy for them.

You don't generally want your infrastructure at max load all the time. You pathways that aren't heavily used so that, if the heavily trafficked area becomes blocked, traffic can redirect to the alternate path without becoming a complete mess.

Besides, just because it is not being employed to serve commuter traffic does not mean it is not being employed. As other people have pointed out: kids often play in the streets. I think this is a good thing, and I think making it safe to be out in your street makes it easier to connect with your neighbors helps foster a sense of community.

Putting houses on courts/circles helps with this, because then it eliminates through traffic, but it isn't always possible.

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 (presumably because people and cars can move simultaneously).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space

Basically, the problem boils down to suburban streets being too hospitable to vehicular traffic. Remove the center dividing line, remove street parking, and narrow the street down to 18 feet wide at most (this provides just enough room for two SUVs side-by-side). Allow redevelopment up to the new desired edge of the street to make it even more visually narrow. Nobody is going to commute through these kinds of streets.

And an alternative for the low-density suburban junk - replace the asphalt with gravel when it starts needing repairs. Seriously. It's both cheaper and discourages through traffic.

Thanks for the link; I'll have to check that out further. I think I've run across documentaries for cities that have similar ideas. I think new development planning should definitely take some of these ideas into account, but we also have to think about what we can do on the margin to ensure the livability of our cities.

>> 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...

Maybe I'm misrepresenting what you are saying, but generally I would think that you don't want maximal utilization of all the paths in a network. If there's a shock to the system (say a major artery is closed down due to some chemical spill) then you want alternate pathways to be available to absorb the unexpected load. Using suburban through-ways in such a case is fine. Having significant amounts of regular traffic going through them is not. Systems need slack and redundancy to be resilient.

Now, will non-residents still use residential through-ways to commute? Indeed, that is fine and can't be totally prevented anyway. But hopefully incentivizing people to use major arteries will apply pressure to improve public transit options (in order to make those arteries more efficient) and will help keep residential streets safer for pedestrians, bicyclists, etc.

edit: fixed formatting

So then, do you agree that having high-traffic going through residential neighborhoods is a problem then?

The parent post's position, as far as I can tell[0], was that the claim "high traffic residential streets are a problem" is itself NIMBY. The argument being that since all streets are part of the same network and owned by the local government, all streets are the same and it doesn't matter which ones are put to the purpose of maximizing vehicle throughput.

In this thread I have made two arguments to the contrary:

- low-traffic residential streets can help absorb excess traffic when there is an occasional shock to the system (large numbers of visitors for a holiday, a major through-way is blocked, etc.)

- low-traffic residential streets enable more communal living.

In other words, there are goals other than maximizing the throughput of cars.

Experience tells me these benefits can be had by poor residential areas as well as rich ones. With this in mind, I think it is clear that high traffic residential areas are a problem that should be addressed. You and others have suggested a host of alternative options that should definitely be discussed. If someone just wants the problem to "go away" yet doesn't care or actively resists attempts to solve the problem on a larger level, then I agree that such a person is a NIMBY. I'm not arguing against the suggested solutions. I'm arguing why we need them.

[0]apologies to the parent post if I misrepresented.

And it's not just wasted fuel, it's wear on the vehicles (which harms used car reliability and negatively impacts the poor), stress on the vehicle occupants, time wasted, delayed emergency response time, etc. Multiply by a hundred million stop signs and turns into something worth optimizing.

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.

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.

Sometimes when late I rather save a few minutes and I don't care which route I take.

Maybe they should let one pick whether they want an aggressive route or not. There's always google maps for slower highway mostly routes.

Not by anyone who understands how roads are paid for.

While I have a parking spot on my own land, in some neighborhoods you get to take a public asset and make it private for either free or 1/10th the market rate. Some are even audacious enough to put cones in front of their houses.

Yes, but it's nuanced. Own the streets in order to control the environment of our mini-castles (our homes), but know that we don't have a legal basis to stand on.

Neighborhood streets weren't organized in a manner to accommodate high traffic patterns, and it ends up being a real issue for local residents. It's not too much of a stretch to be upset that your once quiet neighborhood is now a major traffic jam because of a mobile app.

> It's like having their cake (single-family home with a parking space) and eating it too (avoiding traffic nuisance which they impose on others).

Multi-family units with multi parking spaces cause significantly more traffic issues than single family home.

> As a Frenchman...and it's my right to use it to cut traffic as I see fit.

Is this why people in Paris don't clean up after their dogs on sidewalks? I know Parisians don't represent all the french, but it definitely was a culture shock seeing all that excrement.

In the broader sense, I think this relates to the tragedy of the commons. There are certain societal conventions that tend to make life better on the whole. Keeping traffic to main streets is one of them. Yes, I might gain a minute or two by cutting through your neighborhood, and you might make up a little time cutting through mine. But I don't take that shortcut, because I know it's determintal to the neighborhood and my benefit will be very small. Part of that comes with the expectation that others will in turn do the same for me.

Maybe this is a USAian way of thinking, but I believe that if everyone behaves in the most selfish possible way ("you don't own the street, so you don't get to complain if I use it to save 15 seconds"), life becomes worse for everyone.

One part of the issue is being addressed by restricting traffic (e.g. forbidding left or right turns, etc.) but it also inconveniences the locals. I think a part of a better solution would be if the streets and roads were graded with more nuance in the maps Google/Waze/others use. As it is now, there is little distinction between a proper street or a small back street that's really just a single lane split for both directions, or something that's basically a glorified driveway.

Does France not have differently-sized streets for different traffic needs? You don't have highways there?

What we should have is better infrastructure on the main roads. The whole point is that they go faster than neighborhood side streets; and if that's not working then something isn't right. More or better public transit, more or better bike friendly roads, homes closer to work or telecommute. Or maybe the cauliflower neighborhood design, where basically the neighborhood is a maze, there's a mandatory 90 degree right or left turn ever 3 blocks, so it's totally pointless to use such a neighborhood for rat running. And it's not super expensive to retrofit a neighborhood this way; certainly it's more pedestrian and cyclist friendly. Plus it also slows people down automatically, no one is going to rip a 90 degree right going 20mph.

So you take all the acrimony, regulations, fines, speed bumps, dips, ugly signage away and just design the thing to be driven the way the neighborhood wants, and not designed for rat running.

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.

The issue is that the street was built for 10 cars an hour and now it's getting 300. Why is that important? It determines how wide the shoulders are, whether there's stop signs or roundabouts or traffic lights, whether there's on-street parking, whether there's just painted lines or botts dots' or physical lane barriers, etc.

It's not about ownership, it's about a street that was designed for X now being used for Y.

The community has organized with the city to add in more stop signs and is attempting to get speed bumps put in place that would control the speed of the traffic. Everyone understands that they cannot legally stop someone from driving down the street but they can add in traffic controls to lower the risk to those who live in the area and make it less appealing to leave the main road designed for higher traffic.

In our case, it isn't about owning the streets, but rather is a matter of safety.

Of course your hypothetical driver would choose to take the shortcut when shrouded from the knowledge that it's his road. It's a classic tragedy of the commons. Much of the purpose of traffic laws like these is to avert tragedies of the commons.

The driver died. He hit a schoolbus. Luckily, none of the kids were seated near the point of impact and none were critically injured.

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.

I say this as someone who bought a house because of most of the reasons mentioned here. That being said, buying property does not somehow imbue you with the right to keep things exactly as they are for three decades while you pay it off.

Cities expand, people move in, population increases. If your quiet, picturesque residential street turns into a rush hour parking lot six years later, that's nobody's fault but it doesn't mean the right thing to do is put up speed humps (the oversized, usually movable plastic speed bumps) or whatever other nonsense you can think of to stick it to people because you were unlucky in your choice of property.

If it's not obvious I am using the royal you, not you specifically mikeash :)

Then one day they build more subdivisions around your subdivision and suddenly your street becomes a convenient way to get to this newer subdivision just as you were driving down roads that were quiet before until your subdivision got built.

Increasing traffic on your street is going to be a fact of life if we insist on building out and out rather than up. Densifying existing areas doesn't create the same problems as with increased density comes other transit options, especially public transit, as well as the reduced need to travel so far since everything's packed into a smaller area.

Instead of grocery stores being a mile apart, you might have two or three within a single square mile because of demand.

That didn't stop some busybody dad from flagging me down. I opened my window and he told me I'd better slow down (I had) because there were kids playing. My response to him was that he oughtn't let his kids play in the street. He started ranting, so I pulled away, and he shouted after me "SLOW DOWN YOU ASSHOLE!!".

When I got home, upset by this, I went back and looked at my logs. I also use an app called Torque that logs all the data from my car's OBDII port, and GPS data as well. So I was able to verify that at no point was I going more that 5mph below the posted limit, and from the point where those kids were visible, I was going far slower than that.

My conclusion from just one datapoint is that people are irrational about what they allow their kids to do (play in the road) while expecting other people to accept and mitigate the potential risk; and also that people have little ability to estimate vehicle speed accurately.

Those things are all done safely on grids. Your example does not work to the logical end you want it to.

Instead of creating gigantic roads that give drivers a false sense of confidence, employ smaller roads that encourage people to drive more slowly and use the same space to create safe paths and trails for pedestrians, cyclists and joggers to enjoy.

It's beyond bizarre that the roads in most subdivisions are so broad, and yet by design so lightly used. The amount of space in a typical subdivision devoted to roads and setbacks is staggering.

Study after study shows that the wider the lanes and roads are the faster the traffic will go. Making a street feel like you should drive slowly causes people to drive slowly.

For example, the average suburban cul-de-sac has a wider road than a country highway where you're expected to go at least twice as fast. It's two lanes plus a generous curb-side allowance for parking that, in another twist of irony, a lot of homeowners associations don't even allow.

I've lived in grid-based neighborhoods and apart from a few hours a day when things are unusually busy it's no worse than a street I lived on that connected to nowhere. A little traffic now and then isn't going to kill you, and nobody I knew growing up ever got rubbed out by a car. You quickly learn to respect traffic and avoid it.

I was always under the impression that accidents happen close to home because that's where people spend most of their time so they get a lot more chances to have an accident there.

Hint: what do nearly all routes driven have in common?

If 70% of one's driving is within 5 miles of one's home, but 55% of accidents occur in that radius, then people are indeed safer drivers near their homes -- probably because of familiarity.

Yes, it did. When the barriers were put up, they made some streets more desirable and some less. More desirable == worth more. Less desirable == worth less.

You see, before barriers, all streets were mostly equal. Clearly some streets, like College Ave, Telegraph, etc. were not. But streets like Dwight and Haste (on the hill side) became much worse after the barriers went up.

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 think I might be happier.

The reason traffic gets so bad during rush hour is a simple case of supply and demand: limited supply road of space, lots of demand, and most importantly, the space is effectively free. If cities charged something approaching market rate for the space, traffic gridlock would disappear.

Of course, this is impractical to do in most US cities, because of a lack of alternative ways to get around. Thus, the first thing that needs to happen is to provide more options; once that's done, you can work on incentivizing people to take the methods that can support more people.

(e.g. I don't think GDP/capita takes into account crowded freeways overflowing onto residential streets.)

More generally GDP/capita does not take into account the unevenness of changes in quality of life which occurred on the way to a higher overall GDP/capita.

Can we really say that one statistic is "the important figure" ?

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...

The horror... The horror.

Either way, the town I grew up in had a number of "No through traffic" signs. Generally in areas where people would cut through a neighborhood for a right hand turn instead of going through a light-controlled intersection.

There is a moving violation in many jurisdictions called "Avoiding a traffic control device" that allows officers to ticket people who cut through parking lots and alleys to avoid traffic lights, etc. Laws that restrict the use of smaller roads are consistent with this philosophy.

Regardless of who pays for the road, residential streets are not designed to handle the larger traffic volumes of major streets. The road surfaces are not as durable as major roads, and traffic control devices that are safe for a residential area are not safe for higher traffic loads.

People are not entitled to use things just because their taxes paid for some proportion of that thing. You can't show up at an armory and ask to borrow a gun to shoot some squirrels. Without rules and incentives regulating the use of public goods, public goods are abused, leading to the tragedy of the commons.

This might seem like a design issue, but you can design residential streets to be poor shortcuts by making them curve all over the place and installing traffic calming measures, except these measures also typically make neighborhoods less bike-and-pedestrian friendly when compared to normal gridded streets. One-way streets and traffic restrictions work just as well though. You also avoid the issue of entitled drivers honking every time they go over a speed bump or are obstructed by a pedestrian they think is taking too long, or a USPS truck that blocks one lane every day at the same time.

I think this is something a local government should not do, but it's certainly within its authority (assuming it is the sole funding source - federal or state money may - and IMO should - come with overriding strings attached).

On the second point, I tend to disagree, believing that local government governs best and that travel/turn restrictions on residential side streets in Cambridge ought to be a city matter, not a state matter, IMO. (As a thought experiment, why shouldn't they need Federal approval for them? Why state exactly?)

Ticketing is only the first step, a temporary solution that highlights unacceptable (to local residents) traffic patterns to the local government.

Waze and its user are surfacing inefficiencies in how traffic patterns have been engineered. Though it'll take time for communities to plan and implement solutions, these are definitely solvable problems.

While I 100% agree with this, the other side is that often these streets have parking for the houses that is more utilized at night than during the day. So, while children are out in the summer, say, the streets are ~24' wide, but in the evening, with cars parked, become only 8'- 10'.

There's a project on another street near me to do some traffic calming along a ~10 block stretch. It's actually a relatively small project - they're going to move the existing street parking out next to traffic, move the existing bike lane next to the curb, and make a few minor pedestrian & signage improvements. That effort has been going on for literally years, has taken time from dozens (maybe hundreds) of people, and will probably cost a 6 or 7 figure amount of money.

That kind of investment makes sense when you're dealing with a long-term, ongoing problem. When it's a two-week problem due to construction, it's completely ridiculous. Software is many orders of magnitude easier to change than the physical world.