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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

This is the correct analysis. Unless it's a gated subdivision, the streets are operated by the government for the broad public benefit; not the local benefit of the homeowners.

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There is actually such a thing as city planning and many streets could, in fact, not be operated by the government for broad public benefit but for the benefit of the people living nearby. E.g. in a residential zone in a suburb the streets may actually be intended to connect the homes not for through traffic.

Streets are kind of built for an expected load too right? I live on a dead end and have to assume my street would wear out faster than the neighborhood thoroughfare if it had an equal level of traffic.

Exactly

That is a common suburb design: it tends to fail on the generational level. New Urbanism has a long list of evidence about the problems with suburban design.

Wear and tear to pavement is roughly proportional to vehicle weight to the fourth power; thus cars and SUVs are almost negligible compared to the damage caused by commercial trucks and weather. If a residential street is already marked as "no trucks", then that's all the damage prevention that is worthwhile.

Broad public benefit is not the same as optimal traffic utilization. There's more to life than what can be quantified / sold / made to go faster. I think this goes to the heart of the idea of what humans are for. People in the tech world tend to think humans are machines in a cosmic factory used to maximize economic output.

He did not even slightly mention the frame of optimal traffic distribution. He's talking about whether roads belong to homeowners. Optimal traffic is your frame of discussion, and then you go off talking about how tech people model human systems as factories.

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 think it's an solid albeit tacit frame: "broad" and "traffic" is the key terms here. You're either on the side of a street being most useful for the people directly connected to it (residents) or you're on the side of people far away who need to get somewhere else (commuters, et al). This is a case where "compromise" means both people don't get anything like what they want.

And what brought us here? Treating people as abstractions. Something we in the tech industry do all too much. Myself included.

It's the correct legal analysis, sure, but does it encourage considerate behavior? Does it help or hurt the goals behind zoning laws and traffic engineering? I think it's one-sided to write the whole problem off this way.

The implication that people who have more knowledge about a local area have more right to publicly maintained resources than those who don't is even more troubling. Maintaining unequal access to public resources is a form of corruption, discrimination, or both.

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

I agree that all information should be free for everyone, but your assessment is too harsh. Impossible projects are probably pretty common in many dense cities.

100% agree, it's usually not the fault of the engineers. But in a better system, they wouldn't face political pressure to tell people that indefinite growth without inconvenience or long term investment is possible.

Not entirely sure I agree with that. Roads are not paid for by "everyone's taxes." Many roads are paved/maintained using funds provided by a local municipality. Thus, by that definition, in many instances, a "local road" is indeed paid for and, in a sense, "owned" by the residents who pay taxes to the local municipality that uses their tax dollars to improve said roads.

It is entirely one-sided to side with the general public, and I am firmly for looking at the broad scope. The US is stuffed with local control, and it's produced a global minima as people attempt to optimize for local maxima. Time for that to end.

A fine point in an ideal world. The problem is that as traffic increases, the number of people that drive in a way that doesn't respect the safety of the neighborhood increases. There's a distribution of types of drivers at play here--more samples necessarily results in more observations of people driving poorly even if they are outnumbered. People who have a tendency to look at their phones rather than the road due to their use of an app probably skews the distribution a bit as well.

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.

> A fine point in an ideal world. The problem is that as traffic increases, the number of people that drive in a way that doesn't respect the safety of the neighborhood increases. There's a distribution of types of drivers at play here--more samples necessarily results in more observations of people driving poorly even if they are outnumbered. People who have a tendency to look at their phones rather than the road due to their use of an app probably skews the distribution a bit as well.

> 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.

It's a bit odd that you brought up gated subdivisions; so you think that property taxes don't pay for the right to live on a quiet street? Only people who pay for a gated community get to live on quiet streets?

I'm not the parent, but yes... if you live on a shared street, you have to share it.

You're paying for the right to be able to use that street - and for the street to be maintained in working condition, not any of its specific qualities.

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

By that argument, would you have an objection to me operating a horse carriage on a freeway?

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