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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

This quote seems very telling:

> It used to be that only locals knew all the cut-through routes, but Google Maps and Waze are letting everyone know

So they don't have a problem with people cutting through as long as they're "locals"; it's when the outgroup starts doing the same thing that people get up in arms.

If the through traffic is breaking traffic laws, that's a solvable problem. If the street has insufficient safety measures on it, that's also a solvable problem; see the comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11846812 for an example of getting the road improved.

But if the problem is that the neighborhood street is actually a better route than the arterial roads and highways, then solve that problem; don't blame mapping software for noticing.

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That could just be about quantity, not groups. If only locals do it, that's a relatively small amount of traffic. If outsiders join in, that could be orders of magnitude more.

I do agree with the overall point. If your local road is an attractive route and people use it to go places, don't blame the messenger. But it doesn't have to be about tribalism.

Of course it is necessarily about tribalism. If it were not we could just install an access gate that limits the throughput of the road to X cars per hour (without regard to whether you live on it or not) and consider the problem resolved. But a homeowner would oppose having an equal share with any other citizen for a road on which they live.

Or, to see this the other way: consider a driver shrouded in a veil of ignorance, with the knowledge of what road he lives on and its traffic situation temporarily hidden from him. He sees a shortcut through a neighborhood that may be his, but it's statistically unlikely to be in his large city. He takes it.

Your access gate solution doesn't work because the impact on different drivers is dramatically unequal. If a cross-town commuter can't use that road then he might lose a minute or two of his time. If a resident can't use that road then he can't go home.

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.

There's a certain amount of irony here that people are complaining about cars clogging up their streets but think nothing of what they do when they're driving through other neighbourhoods, especially more urban ones.

Suddenly they get a taste of why people living downtown are not too enthused about highways bringing in more people.

A lot of this mess stems from the absurd designs of modern American subdivisions with their pointlessly twisty roads. A grid-based layout might mean more through traffic, but the traffic can filter through many, many different cross-routes rather than funnelling through the singular optimal route.

> A grid-based layout might mean more through traffic, but the traffic can filter through many, many different cross-routes rather than funnelling through the singular optimal route.

That singular optimal route funnels traffic away from my kids riding bikes, playing street hockey, drawing chalk cities, or anything else their little minds can come up with. It's why houses on a 'quiet street' are coveted, and sell for more than the same house on a busy street.

To call a design like that 'absurd' you'd have to completely ignore all of the reasons people want to pay more for it...

About a year ago, a traffic accident caused Waze to route me through a residential area. I actually respected the speed limit as I went through, and at one point saw kids playing in the street just as I was making a turn, so I slowed further.

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.

Why can't kids play on a street designed only for traffic to houses on that street? I played on the street all the time as a child. Of course, my streets weren't flooded with drivers trying to save a few minutes by driving through residential areas.

Depends on the legislation - some places have "living streets", where 1. the speed limit is low, and more importantly, 2. the driver has to give way to "pedestrians and playing children". http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Spielstrasse.jpg

Still - a pretty bad overreaction from the "Dad" :(

If we wanted that to be a neighborhood playground, we wouldn't have made it out of cement and we wouldn't have allowed any cars, not even residents'.

The fallacy in your logic is that the streets were not designed for kids to play in. They are designed for cars to drive on.

Furthermore, like was mentioned by previous posters and the article, there are further legal traffic laws that can be implemented to protect side streets from incurring unreasonable or unsafe traffic (e.g. no thru traffic, rush hour restrictions, lower speed limits, additional stop signs or even speed bumps, etc). By all means, local governments should be using these laws and regulations to ensure neighborhood streets are as safe as possible. However, even with minimal traffic, kids playing in a street will always be a risk. If the street does not have adequate safety measures AND enforcement then as a parent you should not allow your child to play in or near the street without accepting the risk.

Most streets in older parts of the country were not designed for people to drive on, and plenty of children played on them. Motor vehicles simply killed enough children when they first became common that children were forced elsewhere.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/fighting-traffic

I think you answered your own question: "a street designed only for traffic".

There's something wrong with a street designed only for traffic in a residential neighbourhood.

Streets are not just paths for cars to pass-through on. They are a part of the places we live. They should be safe even for playing children. Cars can pass through cautiously, allowing children to move out of the way. It's not hard to share the space.

We played in the street all the time growing up. Dead-end street. Any kid calls out "car" and we know to get out of the road for a minute.

It's a lot more reasonable in a dead-end or cul-de-sac, where any car is either going to one of the houses there or got lost, and where no vehicle should be moving at more than walking speed.

The same logic applies to non-dead-ends if only people who live in the neighborhood use them. That's why people don't want "their" neighborhood streets used as cut-throughs.

Then those people should move to dead-end streets. Because again, it isn't "their" street. It's the public's street.

You are correct. It is not "their" street. However, it is not unreasonable for people to expect that neighborhood streets not be flooded with traffic beyond what they were designed to handle nor put to purposes for which they were not designed.

It is a public street that was designed to service the neighborhood and the traffic traveling to the neighborhood. It is not a highway.

>It's not hard to share the space.

It is easy to share a pie between two people. It is very hard to share a pie between 400 people. In the US roads ARE NOT designed as a shared space between people and cars. If you play in the road you could very well die due to one person on a phone when they shouldn't be.

Stay alive, keep off the road.

>In the US roads ARE NOT designed as a shared space between people and cars.

That's the problem. Kids cannot safely play in the street in many "safe" neighborhoods in the US. They should be able to, but they can't. Americans practically worship cars. The roads are treated like sacred land. Safety and happiness are set aside for the sake of motoring.

>They should be able to, but they can't.

Why should they be able to? Mass + velocity = splat. You can't deny the physics.

The Americans worshiping cars boat sailed like 70 years ago, it is too late to do anything significant about that in a short period of time without spending trillions. Unless you think replacing most of our infrastructure and moving massive numbers of people is a good idea.

And the roads are treated like scared land. They are the arteries and veins of our economy and life.

Speed limits are not targets, they’re just legal limits. The reasonable speed to be driving along a given road might be much slower than the posted limit.

It looks like you're only responding to my initial statement "I actually respected the speed limit as I went through". If you read farther, you'll see something completely in accord with your statement: "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."

In Houston they're more strongly worded suggestions. I have to remind myself to slow down outside of the city and not get frustrated with other people who naturally drive the limit.

This is a reasonable comment and perspective, and you're definitely to be lauded for driving cautiously. Also, the father you're describing sounds irrational and insulting. But as the father of a two-year old myself, I'm sitting here thinking (a) my child is just not yet completely under control, and no matter how vigilant I am, I cannot completely eliminate all risk (not to mention the complicated issue of where ideally I'd position myself and my kid, as he matures, on the spectrum of safety vs. independence); and (b) you may be the statistical anomaly here for driving so cautiously. I'm not defending the dad, who sounds like a jerk, and I'm also not faulting Waze for making a buck by optimizing traffic patterns. I'm just putting in a plug for all the parents who most definitely realize their kids shouldn't be "playing in the street," but who are frequently shocked by how much easier it is to lock down a server than a loud and complex little creature who can't take off his shoes but who can, unfortunately, run out into the street in the blink of an eye.

One of my neighbors is known for yelling at people driving fast down our road.

His son was hit and killed while crossing the street a few years ago.

I've been hit by cars twice while bicycling. The first time was my own fault, and resulted in a broken leg. The second time was of indeterminate fault, there being a question due to sun glare on a traffic light.

Why is it that when it comes to driving safety, the first and paramount factor that people jump to is speed? To be sure, speed can make some accidents more likely, and probably worsen the results of many accidents. But I don't see that it's a more important factor than inattention, failure to respect traffic signs or lane discipline, failure to signal properly, poor training, poor automobile maintenance. Of these, inattention (viz cell phone usage, but not other contributors such as interacting with passengers) is the only other one I ever see addressed.

Why doesn't society tell people "keep to the right lane" or "signal your turns"? I'm willing to bet that your neighbor never yells at motorists "stop arguing with the kids in the backseat".

> Why doesn't society tell people "keep to the right lane" or "signal your turns"?

It's funny, because I live in California, and I find myself wanting to yell these things a people all the time.

"Keep Right Except to Pass" is a pretty common sign.

And in at least some states you can be ticketed for improper lane use and failure to signal.

It is, in fact, the law through most of the USA. But have you ever heard of anyone getting a ticket for it?

Indeed. I hail from Oregon, where it is the law. Freeway driving, even when busy, is much more pleasant there.

There are a surprising number of blind corners and vision blocking hills in the world (especially around here). Further, increased speed results in increased distance to stop and increased energy in any interaction. There are very few accidents that cannot be avoided or mitigated by reducing the initial velocities.

> "SLOW DOWN YOU ASSHOLE!!".

I hate these people. They never have any idea how fast you're actually driving. In my experience, the person complaining is deflecting blame. The only times this has happened to me is the result of someone's dog running in front of my car because they couldn't be bothered to control it (or let their kids walk a 100lb dog next to a road).

Speed on residential roads is definitely a problem, but yelling at the people who aren't speeding isn't going to solve the problem.

Perhaps the kids were playing in the street because that dad had earlier told them, "stay the hell off my lawn!"

That your kids have to play in the street is an artifact of the design of most suburban environments.

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.

> That singular optimal route funnels traffic away from my kids riding bikes, playing street hockey, drawing chalk cities, or anything else their little minds can come up with. It's why houses on a 'quiet street' are coveted, and sell for more than the same house on a busy street.

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

Seems like everyone buying houses in these areas disagrees with you, and logic agrees with me - a bunch of long, straight, easy to navigate streets leads to more and faster traffic. If the winding streets weren't a navigation/driving problem to begin with, why complain about them?

Grids don't help much. Take a look at Google Maps' traffic report of Los Angeles' perfect grid layout during rush hour: the entire grid is usually solid red, almost every day.

Like most other plans for ameliorating heavy traffic, it is somewhat effective for a short time, but it soon just causes that many more cars to try to drive through the area.

LA traffic defies reason.

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.

It was designed for a smaller number of single car drivers than it has today. And it was not designed for quick/cheap expansion.

I guess any system of transportation would feel like torture for commuters if that system is overloaded and operating beyond its reasonable capacity.

So every major city in the US and Europe?

Don't know. Haven't visited every major city in the US and Europe.

One data point: As bad as it can be at times, especially on/near The Strip, Las Vegas still seems less congested than LA.

Great thing about Vegas is that there's not really any rush hour during the day. Only party-rush-hour at night.

it actually works great with less people. the problem is hitting that threshold requires regulation, which is a political impossibility except for special events.

http://articles.latimes.com/1985-06-07/local/me-16088_1_traf...

as for the 3am traffic, that was probably night time caltrans work, or a drunk driving accident :(

So less people driving leads to less traffic, what a surprise.

I think that LA takes pride in its traffic, like some kind of shared struggle.

It is the only city I have lived in that has an implied 30 minute allowance for traffic delays. Everyone understands and you can use the excuse anytime or day of the week.

You think it would be better if it were a dendritic system? It's hard to believe that e.g., randomly walling off half of those grid links would make traffic better.

I doubt it. It won't fix the fundamental problem of moving lots of people to where they want to go in the city. You can only do that by making the area undesirable to go to for whatever reason (probably not a good option), or by providing some alternate means of getting places. Unfortunately, due to the sprawling way LA is laid out, all of the other options are even worse than driving there.

In a dense area like Manhattan, transport is not so bad because walking, cabs, or the subway are all viable alternatives in many cases.

In a lower density sprawl area like Los Angeles, cabs are prohibitively expensive for most trips, the subway usually doesn't go anywhere near where you are or where you want to go, the buses are stuck in traffic like any other vehicle, and walking is dangerous (due to the lack of pedestrian-friendly sidewalks in many areas) and would take many hours for each trip.

I think the best way to fix LA traffic would be to greatly increase the density and start building upwards so that walking and public transport become viable options for many more cases, but that seems very unlikely to happen anytime soon. It'd take decades to do anyway. So for now, it looks like LA is just stuck with its insane traffic status quo.

The best way to fix it would be to build SkyTran. It's even being developed not that far away at the NASA Ames Research Center.

This is called "Induced Demand"

I don't think there's much irony here. It's a matter of what came first. If you move to a busy downtown then you should know full well that dealing with heavy traffic on your streets is going to be a fact of life. If you move to a quiet suburban street which then years later transforms into a busy artery, that's a completely different situation.

I also completely disagree with your evaluation of pointlessly twisty roads. I dislike them too, but they work really well at keeping through traffic out of the neighborhoods. Many of those pointlessly twisty roads are useless for going anywhere besides the houses they serve, and even when they are useful, they're usually less useful than the main roads. Cut-through traffic is usually a problem in areas with grid layouts, because that makes the side streets nearly as good at getting places as the main road, which can easily transform into "better than" if the main road is congested. For example, the first story in the article is about Takoma Park, which is pretty griddy.

> If you move to a quiet suburban street which then years later transforms into a busy artery, that's a completely different situation.

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 :)

I agree that you don't get to claim sovereignty over your local streets. At the same time, there's an expectation that the character of a neighborhood won't change radically and I don't think that expectation is entirely unreasonable. It's a matter of balancing competing interests. The answer is definitely not to let the local homeowners determine everything about how their street is used, but at the same time the answer is also not to destroy the quality of life of residents for the convenience of through drivers.

There's even more irony here because most new suburbs are built on appropriated farmland and I'm sure the farmers in the area are upset at all the new residential traffic and the incessant complaints about their use of natural fertilizer which produces unpleasant odors.

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.

> Increasing traffic on your street is going to be a fact of life if we insist on building out and out rather than up.

Its also a fact of life if we insist on building up. I've never seen a suburb that could compete with NYC on traffic snarls.

> Densifying existing areas doesn't create the same problems

Yes, it does, though it tends to be limited (at about the level where traffic is frequently slower than walking) by lack of parking spaces limiting the number of cars.

> as with increased density comes other transit options

Other transit options are necessary to allow densifying existing areas, because of the point above; you rapidly hit the point where you can't get more people in and out with existing infrastructure. That doesn't mean you don't cause the same traffic problems with density as with sprawl -- you do, and in fact you maximize them that way.

But locals also know the area better, pretty much by definition. That usually makes them safer drivers.

I know that the streets near my house are filled with kids because of the three schools nearby that use the park as a playground, that almost (not quite) every other intersection is a two-way stop instead of a four-way, and that even though the streets are wide the speed limit is 25.

A flash mob of commuters is not going to have any of those advantages, and they'll be trying to route-find at the same time, so they are going to be less safe drivers. And they're probably going to be frustrated from dealing with traffic and going too fast on top of it.

>>If the street has insufficient safety measures on it

"Sufficient safety measures" is a function of the traffic load. eg, 2-way stops work fine with small volumes of traffic, but not at all for large volumes. Changing safety measures takes lots of time and some money - they cannot possibly react quickly enough to deal with flash mobs of commuters.

It's the opposite... knowing an area well usually makes dangerous drivers. Most accidents happen within some miles from home, mainly because one "knows" the area so well one lets their guard down.

Or, that result is just an artifact of how most driving happens within a few miles of the driver's home.

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.

"Most accidents are close to home" is a Stat 101 Day 1 example of fallacious statistical reasoning.

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

I do know that if I never go within 20 miles of my house, I have an 80% chance of living forever.

Source? It seems much more likely that most accidents happen within some smallish radius from home because one is much much more likely to be driving there as home is the presumably, on aggregate, most frequent starting or ending point for a person (besides, possibly work or a transit hub, etc.) – the other end points are much more dispersed, but home definitely biases the distribution of driving location and therefore one would expect to see more accidents near home even if the moment by moment probability of getting into an accident was uniform.

Two people have made contradicting claims, neither with a source.

Unless there is evidence stating otherwise, I am going to go with the null hypothesis that people drive the same no matter where they are.

Certainly knowing an area can breed inattention, or risky behavior based on familiarity. My hunch is that it still works out to be safer on average, but admittedly I have no data for that.

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.

Most accidents happen near home because most driving happens near home.

A flash mob of commuters is going to know whether a stop is 2-way or 4-way (there are signs), and they are going to know what the speed limit is (there are signs). If someone is as attentive as they need to be while driving, it's irrelevant whether the park is a playground or there are three schools nearby or whether there are kids in a given house. I don't know about you, but if I'm somewhere I've never been before because I'm going around a traffic jam, I am even more attentive than normal.

If someone isn't as attentive as they need to be, that's a different problem altogether.

I would think the problem is the volume of traffic faced by pedestrians and neighbors, not specifically who drives.

Many roads are simply suitable for moderate traffic.

"Solving the problem" in this case often involves a roadblock in the middle so that you cannot drive through.

Compared to changing Waze, this is "fair". But are you really happier then?

> I would think the problem is the volume of traffic faced by pedestrians and neighbors, not specifically who drives.

Possibly, but that wasn't the phrasing, and I suspect that wasn't the mindset.

> Compared to changing Waze, this is "fair". But are you really happier then?

Yes. Because if they apply to the local authority to get a road blocked for through traffic, that's the proper process to enact change at the right level.

In my part of the world, a lot of "quiet neighbourhoods" have put up boom gates at strategic entrances. Some are manned by security guards that open for you. In others, you have to swipe your hand over a sensor to make it open for you.

It's used mostly for security, but no doubt it helps with keeping traffic-avoiding individuals from going through.

Usually, yes. Car traffic flows like a liquid: anywhere it can, not where it ought to; the road is not blocked off to access - to cars, it just becomes two leaves instead of an edge, i.e. unroutable except for destination traffic.

> So they don't have a problem with people cutting through as long as they're "locals"; it's when the outgroup starts doing the same thing that people get up in arms.

That's one (particularly dramatic) way of looking at it. You could also interpret it to mean that it's just about the overall number of people making use of the routes. Adding in non-locals might just push that number over a certain threshold.

I believe it's not an in- versus out-group issue as such. The issue is that the number of locals is a tiny fraction of the number of outsiders passing through, leading to a vast increase in traffic on the formerly quiet street.

When only locals who lived on or near the street knew about the route, you might see five cars a day cutting through. Now that Waze is onto it, they're seeing five cars a minute cutting through.

The neighborhood street is only better because it is sized to serve the needs of the community round it. If everyone is making use of it then it's going to fail periodically, not unlike a small blood vessel in proximity to a blocked artery.

Also, it's simply not possible at present to iterate the infrastructure the way it is to recalculate traffic timing; it's always going to be possible to arbitrage the traffic flow, so to speak.

Local people may know that children live and play there, and drive more cautiously.

(I didn't downvote you.)

You shouldn't need tribal knowledge like that to drive safely and to keep others safe; the roads should be marked well for everyone, and all drivers should be cautious in all neighborhood settings.

You would think that but have you been driving lately? 20% are just assholes all the time. Not to far from me some guy ripped through a school zone at 60mph. This resulted in a fatality. Of course the family was on the news saying how a nice guy he was but what nice guy drives 60mph through a residential street.

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

Whereas to everyone else, the street looks and feels like a many-lane freeway, right? (No. It's just a convenient excuse; artificial stupidity, if you wish: "So I can't go max speed in here, Carmageddon-style? How am I supposed to know that an obviously residential street has residents? Traffic code? I barely know 'er!")

Locals only, brah. Go back to the marked detour you kook.

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