The War on Waze
reason.com
reason.com
They give the appearance of being quicker. Journeys with Waze feel faster. Your brain is more active when driving a Waze route. You remember driving along a Waze route.
Most people when they commute enter autopilot mode. They often can't remember the details of what they were doing 20 minutes ago when they arrive at their destination. People commuting often do not need Sat Navs - they will be driving the same way twice a day for months if not years. To change to an active mode of driving where you pay attention and are out of auto pilot makes it feel more faster. Magicians and story tellers will tell you that it's the memory of the performance or story which counts the most - what the user takes with them after is important, and can be shaped.
More turns, more intersections. More fast stretches of road (and more stops) makes for a more exhilarating experience driving. It might not be more quicker, or it might be. Most (i.e. not HN readers) people won't notice, or if takes a little bit longer, they will feel that it's quicker.
Remember - Waze had gamification built right into the platform. Drivers were encouraged to go out of their normal way, to engage with the platform for years. They know what gamification means at a psychological level.
Regular routing considers shortest path, quickest route, simplest paths, stick to highways etc. Waze prioritises driving that makes the user appreciate Waze more.
I'm reminded of a comment I read on HN the other day, which expressed that anger arises from being blocked from progressing by things outside of your control but not outside of possibility. People generally don't care if something takes a long time, they care when they notice reasons why it need not take as long a time as it does.
I assume the excuse is that it's to prevent people from just sticking random things on the map and muddying the data, but I fail to see how that is any different from normal use. Can't I just report speed traps anytime I want, regardless of whether or not they exist?
Sure, there's always the option of just not participating in the crowdsourcing, and that's fine. But not everyone is going to take that option, because people are... well, people, and they act like people do.
A disclaimer just doesn't cut it.
Waze is some cases is not literally faster as it seems the traffic can build up faster than a recommended route change can happen.
One thing I have noticed is Google Maps will suggest going off a main street for a few blocks then merge back into the said main route. This cuts off everyone who's been waiting in line, and potentially puts me in a situation of having to make a left across perhaps 4 lanes of congested traffic, with no light or turn signal. This _IS_ kind of assinine, and it certainly wouldn't hurt for Google/Waze et. al. to feel some pressure to cut these suggestions out.
In the months leading up to the opening of the last section of the trains I knew people that had jobs already near train stops. A few had moved into apartments specifically to take advantage of the train. They talked about taking advantage of it on weekends, too. My wife had one of those jobs and we were looking at houses near the train line and could see the home prices increasing. While the weather is nice year round, she worked late hours and was concerned about walking to/from the train stop alone.
There is a great video[1] by Wendover Productions about how to fix traffic, explaining exactly this effect. tl;dr: The more road capacity you supply, the more traffic will come since potential demand will "always" outstrip supply.
I'm also curious how those traffic issues apply to subways. I feel like I've seen similar problems where subways exceed capacity. I wonder if the cost/benefit or travel time/capacity is better or worse?
That's a jerk thing to do in uniformly bad traffic, but it actually makes sense if traffic clears up ahead.
That's a jerk thing to do in uniformly bad traffic, but it actually makes sense if traffic clears up ahead.
If everyone does it, it's just using available capacity. I get that people don't like spillover traffic coming through their neighborhood, but maybe that would be incentive to improve the main road.
It's sort of a modified tragedy of the commons - as long as few people do it, it rewards the side-road takers. Then the side-road saturates and nobody is any better, only the locals are worse off.
Think about when there are two lanes merging into one. If everyone gets over early it dramatically slows down, but if everyone merges last minute like a zipper it is not as bad.
this is not generally true - look at the north korean highways. lanes upon lanes and not single traffic jam in sight.
...
i'm kidding.
It also takes as fact that it's "as inefficient" to use Waze. My experience is Waze often does cut commute time down; not always; but on the aggregate it demonstrably, scientifically, provably does. That's why it's a huge success and people use it.
I do think there are problems with drivers disregarding the law (speed limits, signs etc.) on smaller streets, and perhaps they need to be more aggressively punished for doing so. In general I am for more aggressive fees, sentencing and punishment for violating driving rules.
The problem is a lack of rationality. A politician that says "I'm going to spend billions on new cycle paths" is somehow going to be more popular than a politician that says "I'm going to spend billions on new roads". Even in cities where cyclists make up <5% of commuters.
There's a large body of evidence [0][1] indicating that adding road capacity does not alleviate congestion. In the short run, one tends to see immediate rises in traffic on the new infrastructure. Over a longer period, the amount of traffic utilizing new infrastructure increases until all added capacity is being consumed. This is known as induced demand [2].
Congestion pricing [3] is a more economically viable manner of reducing congestion on shared infrastructure, but it comes with its own set of concerns [4].
[0] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/11/californias-d...
[1] https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congestion_pricing
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/nyregion/congestion-prici...
If we should reject road expansion because it fails to decrease travel times, then we should certainly reject a shift towards public transit, which actively makes them much worse.
"Congestion" is a non-problem. You get no points for "solving congestion" by kicking everyone off the road. It's quite likely that a highly congested road is still delivering better end-to-end travel times and user experience than a realistic bus system.
"Solving congestion" is great for you if you can afford the congestion charge, but it's not clear why a democratic society should let the rich kick the poor off the roads for their personal convenience. Really the only angle under which it's a coherent goal is reducing carbon emissions, but then you don't even need to talk about induced demand - it's sort of obvious that more road capacity means more driving.
In a city with bicycle lanes, bikes are a lot faster than cars for short trips, and they require far less infrastructure - since bike lanes are about a third of the width of a road, and they require no dedicated parking space. Not to mention the fact that bikes are far cheaper to own and operate.
I can understand having a sentimental attachment to cars - but in practical terms, they're a ridiculous solution to the problem of mass transit.
Because we don't all share an origin, destination, and schedule. Public transit can be extremely effective for the parts of the journey that it covers, but the extreme ineffectiveness of walking the other parts can cancel all that out. You have to completely rethink density and development patterns to get to a point where most origins and destinations are near stations. That would take decades even if we wanted to do it, and SB827 was just defeated in California. Then you have to run trains frequently enough that schedules don't matter. That's expensive as hell and the necessary capital projects take decades. And even if you do them, they might deteriorate and regress later if you don't keep up with the maintenance (see: New York).
When I lived in Berkeley, BART covered 90% of my commute distance, station to station, in 25 minutes. My actual end-to-end commute time was over an hour, basically a wash compared to taking an Uber over the Bay Bridge at rush hour. Bicycling to my local station got it down to maybe 50.
25 minutes is an entire commute the average American. Being just 1.5 miles away from a station doubled that. Public transit has a wickedly hard problem to solve - even 90% coverage is still next to useless.
I live in a city with very good public transport. My average tram trip is about 20 minutes, and there is usually one that goes directly to where I want to go. I live within a hundred meters of a tram stop - and this is far from unusual. I also live within a mile of a rail station, and there is a bus stop within a hundred meters.
As I see it, there are two intertwined problems: 1. American cities are built around the car. Homes are distributed across vast areas, in the form of suburbs. 2. Many cities have very bad public transport options. This makes cars more viable, despite the inherent inefficiency of what is essentially a road-train with a hundred drivers.
If you experience transport in the context of a society built around the car, then sure, a car is going to seem viable. Vast amounts of capital has gone into the system that makes it viable. Living and working patterns are all built around it. It doesn't change the fact that fundamentally, physically, a car takes more money to build, run, takes up more space to carry fewer people, requires more infrastructure - and, even given a network of roads vastly more comprehensive than any train or tram system ever designed, works very badly.
Suburbs are also horrible from an efficiency perspective.
We practically used to, until cars encouraged development to spread out.
> You have to completely rethink density and development patterns to get to a point where most origins and destinations are near stations.
In other words, go back to what the world was like before cars.
> Public transit has a wickedly hard problem to solve
But not impossible. European cities seem to have a less difficult time.
European cities had the good fortune to lock in a healthy level of density as "neighborhood character" thousands of years ago, so that the same sorts of structures Americans read as the rapacious excesses of a new era of unfettered capitalism and runaway inequality (i.e. 5-story apartment buildings) are instead seen as historic. They also aren't in a position of having to unwind the "mistake" of certain neighborhood communities existing.
>In other words, go back to what the world was like before cars.
The places we would invade to "go back" to, and the places we would abandon to "go back" from, are now all occupied by humans with voting rights and a preference for the status quo. Not to mention that the population is simply larger, and more concentrated in metro areas. The city centers abandoned during suburban flight were quickly claimed by low-income people of color, and also a bunch of extra people were born in (or migrated from farmland and small towns to) suburbia.
>We practically used to, until cars encouraged development to spread out.
The tenements of pre-car industrial cities were so traumatic that we still have the scar tissue today, in the form of wildly overbearing zoning and building codes. The Progressive movement's obsession with making sure buildings have enough light and air and open space, which holds back San Francisco from even European-level density today, is rooted in the outrage felt towards living conditions 100+ years ago, which the car saved us from.
Obviously there's a healthy middle ground and it's frustrating that we don't take it, but our culture has the memory of what it was like to live too close together, and quite likes the ability to spread out.
Why does public transit increase travel times?
But the journey from Cambridge train station to Coventry train station takes 1h47m by car and 2h16m by train [1], as the train takes a V shaped route via London. Birmingham New Street station to Norwich station takes 3h6m by car, 3h57m by public transport [2]. Kings Lynn to Cromer, 1h7m by car, 2h27m by public transit [3].
And that's going from train station door to train station door in major cities - if you're going to somewhere out-of-town, the public transport penalty can be even greater.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't build public transport, of course. I'm not a car owner, so I rely on public transport to get around. But we also shouldn't deny the downsides of public transport.
[1] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/dir/Cambridge+Station+[CBG],+S... [2] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/dir/Birmingham+New+Street+Stat... [3] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/dir/kings+lynn+train+station,+...
Buses are like Open Seating offices, but for transportation - just like sharing one big table at work, there's little privacy on the bus. You're going to learn about this person's skin condition because they're yelling into their cell phone.
The trunk of a car is a mobile secure locker, allowing the car to become a sort of mobile base in a remote city - you can repeatedly visit to stash purchases in the trunk, and have a cooler of food and drinks stored there as well.
I'd hesitate to specify that certain equilibria are reasonable while others are not. Building more roads to reduce congestion does not achieve that goal, in part because of the latent demand you describe (see [0] "Effect in transportation systems").
Ultimately, if your goal is to decrease time spent traveling, you will see more benefit from alternative policies. Such policies may include:
* increasing cost of using the roads (e.g. congestion pricing)
* constructing alternate, denser forms of public infrastructure (e.g. subways)
* increasing the density of passengers in vehicles (buses, carpooling, etc.)
* funding technological advances that increase the density of vehicles utilizing the road (e.g. self driving cars)
You could do this by decreasing the efficiency of the non-freeway roads, or increasing the cost of using the roads, which both only ‘solve’ the problem by reducing general quality of life (especially for poorer people, who might just get even poorer if they can’t commute affordably).
Or you can increase road capacity to keep up with population growth, and invest in alternative transport that people actually want to use. That means no cycle lanes or buses, because people really don’t want to use them (buses are only really efficient for short trips, if you have to change buses to get to work then it ends up taking so long you may as well just be inefficiently sitting in the comfort of your own car).
This doesn't work because in a city you'll eventually you end up with more roads and parking lots than buildings. US cities were built like this, and the more road capacity you build, the more sprawl you get (everything is further apart), which increases how much people have to drive which increases the traffic... It's an evil spiral of congestion.
The scaling doesn't work.
For another similar example, think of how much percentsge space you need in a 2 story building devoted to elevators (almost none) vs a 200 story building (a significant percentage of the middle core of the building is nothing but elevators). Take that and scale it even worse, and you have roughly the small town vs big city traffic issue.
The truth is that you can, in fact, build enough roads to reduce congestion. It may be too expensive. The road land use fraction may be too high. There may be political problems. All of these factors have to be taken into account before deciding to build more roads.
Nevertheless, it is physically possible to build enough roads, and anyone who doesn't acknowledge this basic reality isn't having a serious conversation.
Sure it's probably possible, but by the time we've built that many roads we'd need to cycle from the carpark to the building anyway.
If roads took up zero physical space, I'd agree with you, but the perverse thing is that as population density goes up, you not only have more people on the roads (requiring more road), but you also have more need for living space, stores, and office buildings (all which take up space, giving less room for roads).
As it is, comparing it to a small town is meaningless.
More traffic is what those roads are for. More traffic means more activity. Focusing only on the capacity / congestion couple is myopic. If you really want 0 traffic just remove all roads: not sure the side effects will be as easily dismissed.
Increasing road capacity can cut commute times, for like a week. When people know they can get somewhere more quickly and more reliably because of increase road capacity, they drive more, which in aggregate, causes the new roads to become as gridlocked as the old roads, and the old roads are still gridlocked.
Single occupancy vehicles are just not efficient for moving large numbers of people around. In order of preference you basically want people to 1. not have to commute (telecommute) 2. walk 3. ride a light vehicle (bike, electric scooter, whatever) 4. take a train or Ferry 5. take a shuttle 6. take a bus 7. carpool 8. drive 9. take a plane.
(Actually not sure where Lyft and Uber fall in that stack given there's evidence that ridesharing platforms seem to be increasing traffic in the areas they operate in.)
Of course you can mix any and all of those but your city's transportation infrastructure ought to accommodate each of them and prioritize each in kind.
To talk about efficiency, it's also not very efficient to assign a whole dwelling to each family. But that's what people want to have, so you can either plan for that, where you at least have the possibility of success, or you can continue to plan cities based upon utopian fictions, and continue to get the same results.
Are you suggesting that if cities upzoned more areas for smaller dwelling like townhomes and duplexes, families would, what, refuse to live in them? Those units would just remain empty? Because if so, you're wrong.
It's not the free market, it's not individual choice blocking smaller dwellings, it's zoning regulations.
The popularity of detached housing is really only a post-WWII phenomenon created by massive infrastructure investments in highways and tax incentives for homeownership (versus renting, which is basically pouring money down a hole in the US). It's a historical anomaly, and I don't think you can disentangle the desire for detached homes from the policy structures that incentivize it.
But saying [t]he popularity of detached housing...[is] a historical anomaly is somewhat misleading.
Widespread prosperity is new by historical standards. Penicillin is new by historical standards. Air conditioning is new by historical standards. It's unclear why owning detached housing - similar to what only richer people used to own - is any different.
If Texas can't build enough roads to solve the problem, no one can. Houston's road system is enormous.
"We built everything for cars, and now everyone is driving!" What a shock.
The idea that politicians pledge to spend "billions" on biking (and actually do so) is particularly laughable. Where exactly is this biketopia? (It doesn't exist)
Your position is based entirely upon a utopian fiction, where if only we could tear the whole city down and rebuild it from the ground up, then maybe people would want to bike to work.
Look, if you want a serious discussion, maybe don't, like, lie?
> In LA less than 50% of the transit budget is spent on roads, despite them being the primary facilitator of transport.
1. What's the cumulative investment there? LA spent decades building out freeways, after all. It takes a while to turn that ship around.
2. LA is explicitly turning away from car-centric design and spending because it didn't work. They're the poster child for it, and traffic is the worst in the country. Maybe more transit and bike spending won't completely 'solve' traffic, but going by other cities' examples, they should be able to make it less bad.
Excess capacity induces demand, attracts it, by enabling people from further away to consume the capacity.
Right, but commutable land grows exponentially as roads are improved further from the city center. So, depending on what you value, it's a net win when a twenty minute commute gets you ten miles away instead of five.
2. People like to bike, and unlike cars, you can make the case that not very many people bike because the infrastructure doesn’t support biking. If less than 5% of the people are biking, but the politician who promotes biking is popular, that tells you something about reality vs. what people want.
3. Car companies have undermined attitudes that made driving a secondary mode of transportation (not to mention the streetcar conspiracy). It’s due time for a correction that allows North Americans to live a lifestyle less reliant on cars.
Why can't we have well-designed public transport? Edinburgh manages to do this, so I'm sure other cities could if they wanted to. The basic ideas are bus lanes and lots of high-density housing.
This would also have advantage of making housing affordable.
Oh who am i kidding. Thats politically impossible.
Not EVERYONE would have to live in the city. A lot are interested, and would move there themselves, and this would cut down on traffic significantly.
Because those people are going somewhere and increasing capacity of one road typically just moves the bottleneck. The only exceptions to this are when the traffic is going through the area with the new capacity and other other side has excess capacity. So something like increasing the capacity on a city bypass will reduce congestion, but increasing capacity into the city wont.
The other problem is induced demand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand), when driving is quick and easy more people will drive until that's no longer the case.
> A politician that says "I'm going to spend billions on new cycle paths" is somehow going to be more popular than a politician that says "I'm going to spend billions on new roads".
How many (non-dutch) cities in the world have spent billions on cycle paths? They should be more popular because they're doing something that will actually reduce traffic and save money long term (cycle paths require a lot less maintenance), but IME it's the ones promising new roads that keep getting elected.
You don't have to be a genius to figure out that only devoting 50% of your transport budget to the mode used by 90% of the population is not a recipe for success.
Shifting even tiny numbers of people from cars to bicycles shaves off peaks of car traffic. Bicycle throughput is several times higher per unit of infrastructure. That has incredible potential to hugely benefit people driving cars by improving car traffic flow. Crazy high ROI potentially!
According to your logic too, one could argue that only devoting 1.5% of the transport budget to the mode used by 3.9% of its population is serious underfunding.
[0] https://blog.sfgate.com/bicycle/2014/04/21/new-sfmta-budget-...
(Also incorrect is that people "don't want to cycle to work", I see literally hundreds of them every morning in SF, and it's growing every year.)
There are many arguments in favor of cycling infrastructure, but unfortunately I'm versed enough in anti-bike comment threads to recognize someone who won't be convinced :) But here goes...
* bikes do less damage to road than cars, and therefore the maintenance cost of bike lanes is lower than car lanes, which require frequent paving
* bikes are important as a "last mile" transportation option for public transit commuters. densely-placed bike share stations improve the feasibility of public transit for people whose homes or offices are 1-2 miles from a train station.
* bikes are far smaller than cars and so you can push more traffic through a given width of road than with cars. this is especially relevant if you ever get to a downtown stretch where one car turning right at a pedestrian crossing causes an entire green light to be wasted on the rest of the cars (basically every light along Market Street in SF). cars are just wide and clumsy when driving in dense downtowns.
* the government frequently subsidizes behaviors that are considered virtuous (or conversely, imposes "sin taxes"), and also subsidizes services that benefit lower-income citizens. both of those apply here. car parking in downtowns can run $40+ for a day. bike share and bus commutes are $2-5 and keep people active.
I could go on, but again, I don't think your mind will be changed much.
You’re also falling for the same fallacy that cycling advocates fall for by obscuring the impact of cycling spending. It doesn’t matter if hundreds of people want to cycle to work, or if cycling adoption is up 10% if all you’ve done is gone from 3% of commuters to 3.4% of commuters (which is where I believe SF is at after all of the billions they’ve invested in it). It’s the same as the startup that says they’re growing faster than google because they managed to go from 50 customers to 100. We all know it’s bullshit, it’s just a popular self-delusion that people enjoy.
Wrong. Vancouver, for example, built a network of protected bike lanes in a few years, and saw bike rates skyrocket. Bike commute mode share is now 10%, despite having much less than 10% of available road space, making bikes highly land-efficient.
> There are no cases in the world where cycling infrastructure has been successful in having a measurable impact on congestion.
That's because the number of cars increases to fill the amount of road space. But if you look at Amsterdam or Copenhagen, plenty of people are willing to bike when there's good bike lanes and paths for doing so.
In contrast, cities like SF or Seattle have a bare handful of protected bike lanes, a smattering of walk/bike trails, and they hardly connect to each other. It's hardly a surprise that most people don't want to bike in those conditions.
> which is where I believe SF is at after all of the billions they’ve invested in it
If SF had spent "billions" the city would be covered in protected bike lanes. Needless to say, it isn't. This is a made-up figure.
There’s a lot of examples of cities spending huge sums of money on cycling (SF has spent far more than a billion on it), and none of them have been successful in drivingcycling adoption.
Also the only studies that show road building as ineffective are looking at cities that have many years of population growth where road spending didn’t even remotely keep up. People don’t materialize out of thin air to fill up new roads. You’re using neglect of infrastructure to justify further neglect of infrastructure.
This is wrong.
Biking is popular in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, it's popular in Munich, it's recently gained popularity in Vancouver, it's popular in Davis, CA, it's popular in Tokyo. Believe it or not, those cities don't all have the same climate.
Geography is more of an issue, but it's becoming less and less of one over time thanks to the steadily increasing popularity -- and steadily decreasing cost -- of ebikes.
Also, you claimed SF spent many billions on bike infrastructure. Where's the source?
Hills are becoming less of an issue due to ebikes (and electric bikeshare). The other possible solution is installing bike lifts, but, well, most cities still treat biking as a toy, and are unwilling to spend significant sums on it.
What would make me feel confident enough to cycle to work? Protected bike lanes and/or a massive shift in attitude among the drivers I encounter as a pedestrian and watch through the bus window.
I never said building infrastructure would convince everyone to bike. Rather, the government can (and often does) move society as a whole in one direction using money as a lever. Do taxes on gas or alcohol prevent everyone from driving or drinking? No, but they move the needle, just like building cycling infrastructure does.
And I never cited the "10% increase" as an important metric for the success of cycling infrastructure, you did. None of my arguments is about the absolute number of people cycling, although others have pointed out that biking is likely underfunded relative to the number of people who use the infrastructure. I just cited the increasing number of people on bikes as a counterpoint to your claim that "no matter what people say, they don't want to cycle to work".
And I can't see how SF could have invested nearly what you claim in biking infrastructure. Their cycling infrastructure is not particularly good compared to most "bike friendly" cities.
Can you cite any of those figures?
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...
(Source: https://www.bikebiz.com/news/traffic-in-the-city-2018 )
I think the source goes against both your claim and its own headline. Diagram 3.11 shows cycling to be a small part of the makeup.
3.11 appears to cover the whole day rather than just the rush hour, and again, the context of AmericanChopper's comments was "commuters". 3.5 in the original report (search for 'Traffic in the City 2018') gives more context as to how modal share varies throughout the day.
Sounds like people didn't want to cycle to work, but it was the next best thing after the car reduction measures.
Meanwhile, you talk sneeringly about "invest[ing] billions into poorly designed public transport". Public transport is, of course, something London does very well. Car commuting across the whole of London, inner and outer, is around 25%. Public transport commuting is around 50%. (Source: LTDS. This covers London residents only, so is probably an underestimate given the vast numbers of people from outside London who commute into the city by rail.)
It's also been measurably more successful than many other cities in driving cycling adoption. But if your argument in support of that (overall relatively minor) success involves statements such as "define London", and cherry picking particular suburbs, then I think that speaks to the strength of it.
Less than 2%. Not 50%. Not even 5%.
Maybe you have more up-to-date information to counter these numbers? If so, let's see them, please, as currently it seems like you're making wildly inaccurate unsubstantiated claims as the foundation for all of your comments on this subject.
Thanks.
https://blog.sfgate.com/bicycle/2014/04/21/new-sfmta-budget-...
That number is ludicrous, you made it up.
I didn't get that from my reading, why did you reach that conclusion? The article seems to focus more on the problem and the possibly misplaced controversy, rather than policy solutions.
Disclaimer: I usually do use Waze commuting, but find its suggestions in certain places downright bizarre.
I've had Google Maps (desktop web browser) give me a route once through heavy traffic, but when I dragged the route to a mostly-parallel highway, my estimated time decreased by 10 minutes. So it's not perfect, or they wanted more users to give more data on the traffic.
With Waze, it almost always tells me to get off the highway at a certain point and then take a parallel (smaller) road to work. If I, as I now almost always do, ignore it and drive past the exit to take one couple miles down (and much closer to work) I can see Waze's ETA dropping by a few minutes. I complained to Waze about it, bit don't see any changes so far.
OT: I'm livid at all the efforts to punish drivers for driving (like the toll etc). We aren't driving for fun! I bet most of us would prefer not driving. I try to work from home when possible because driving in commute hours is a terrible waste of time.
I don't have big problem with tolls, as long s they are not on taxpayer-funded roads, and actually get you something. Not just the privilege of crossing the bay instead of driving around the Bay.
That's unlikely to happen. Such drivers make up a large and vocal section of society and would push back on those policies. Look at how speed cameras and red light cameras get shouted down like it's some how unfair to automatically point out that almost everyone is breaking the law.
Probably because (a) in theory there are several good reasons for caution in automating law enforcement and (b) in practice speed/red light cameras often turned out to be unfair.
https://uspirg.org/trafficcamreport
http://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-ci...
https://www.wired.com/2017/05/red-light-cameras-may-issuing-...
You say it yourself, almost everyone is breaking the law. That is a big red flag to me suggesting there is an imbalance between what we codify into law and what actually works.
Now it suggests something entirely different to me. In particular, I think the casual disregard for "the rules" in heavy traffic is an amplified reflection of the "putting yourself first" values of American society (though surely not unique to it). I think the amplification comes from the relative anonymity of individuals in vehicles, the actual lack of consequences for breaking "the rules", and the "fear of missing out" after seeing other road users benefit from breaking them.
In the past, I've seen extending the yellow light times trotted out as a way to improve intersection safety (as opposed to enforcing not entering on red). That analysis, in my estimation, hinges on the idea that drivers are accidentally running red lights. From what I can tell, that is not the case. I believe attentive drivers run red lights because it saves them a whole signal cycle. I don't even think extending interlock (all directions red) times would have a meaningful impact on safety as I suspect users would quickly adjust to it, as they do to adjustments to the speed limit.
I can imagine someone making the claim that intentionally running a recently red light is not actually dangerous. I've not searched for any data in this respect, but common sense suggests the benefit is far outweighed by the risk.
On the subject of speed limits. In at least some cases, speed limits are intentionally set to a speed lower than the road's design speed. Experience has shown that the posted speed limit provides an anchoring effect on most road users. Increasing the posted speed limit to the speed that the "majority" of traffic travels at often has the effect of increasing the speed of traffic on the roadway.
The underlying principles of the rules with respect to speed, right of way, and traffic control signals are in my opinion reasonable in dense urban areas. I think there is a strong disconnect between the perceived risk of operating a vehicle and the actual risk of operating a vehicle.
In the end I support data-driven lawmaking. We know that speed limits are ignored by 90% of everyone, and we know very well how road design parameters such as lane width affect the way people drive. I think we should ditch speed limits altogether in the city and focus on these things which work.
The actual risk of driving a vehicle is astoundingly low given the physics involved. Wrecks are somewhat common but injuries relative rare and death is such a remote possibility that most people can disregard it compared to all the other ways the universe is out to get them :-).
And what about the risk to other road users, pedestrians and cyclists, who are not encased in steel crumple zones?
Regulating driving behaviour is not just about preservation of the driver, it's also about creating an environment conducive to a functioning community. At present the bias is strongly towards the car-user ( e.g. making pedestrians wait at crossings ) but at least the principle is maintained.
Even with highway fatalities declining it remains one of the most likely ways to die for younger age groups.
There's a bit of a "paradox" in that likelihood of death per mile driven is extraordinarily low, likelihood of your dying this year from a motor vehicle accident is very low... But if you die this year, the likelihood you died in a car accident, rather than from something else entirely, ends up somewhat high.
I can imagine someone making the claim that intentionally running a recently red light is not actually dangerous
Every so often, several such drivers come in succession, and the resulting stream of red-light-runners looks like something out of a film shoot.
The problem with both of those is that they get put in places where they maximize revenue rather than maximize safety.
San Diego has several extremely dangerous intersections which regularly result in fatalities--which never so much as see a policeman let alone a red light camera.
Instead of putting them on those dangerous intersections, the cameras got placed on high-volume intersections that weren't particularly dangerous but were particularly good at trapping people at a yellow light--especially during rush hour. The cameras had the added bonus that they increased the number of accidents at those intersections.
Speed cameras tend to be similar. Rather than speed cameras getting placed on stretches of road where it's critical to get people to slow down, they get placed on roads where the speed limit is particularly out of whack with the 85th% speed.
almost everyone is breaking the law
My neighborhood (Carthay) has been getting a lot more cut-through traffic. There are days that seem particularly "Waze-y", when it's basically just gridlock on our little streets for an hour. I imagine it's due to apps re-routing people.
But I don't really think it's any faster for the commuter. I'm reminded of this article (seemingly now password-protected, so I'll link to a summary) that Waze chronically underestimates your travel time, while Apple Maps chronically overestimates (and therefore overdelivers):
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/02/22/informal-testing-...
From my anecdotal experience, Waze does vastly overestimate the benefits of a crazy route, like making a left turn from a stop sign across 6 lanes of rush-hour traffic.
Waze is definitely a contributing factor. Blame can be shared.
From a utilitarian point of view bus only lanes are a no-brainer, at least in peak.
A visualization: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tfJHpDfakqo/Up_mmjALPtI/AAAAAAABQM...
Removing the bus lane was specifically mentioned in the 2010 Conservative party conference and was a controversial point on programmes such as Top Gear. It was suspended in 2010, reopened temporarily for the 2012 Olympics and then completely scrapped.
Anecdotally, bus lanes are still widespread on non-motorway roads in UK towns and cities. I have no problems with these lanes, since they seem to have a better ratio of full, frequent buses to cars than on the M4 motorway.
Getting off-topic, but I've been a heavy user of the M27 / M3 for approx 25 years. In that time, the main delay that I encounter routinely is now the stretch from Southampton to Winchester whereas it used to be the top end of the M3 (around Junction 4a). More generally, although the UK's traffic density has increased this (anecdotally) seems to have been offset to some extent by significant improvements in several key motorway junctions (e.g. M27/M3, A34/M4), which I feel that I can often get through faster than I used to.
My previous image looks like maybe 500m, so say 2.5km long line of cars.
Cars can't travel that close together. For driving at say 70kph which is around 20m/s, for a safe 3s distance between cars you need 60m for each car. I guess around 30 cars in each lane of the photo, so 5x30=150 cars
60m x 150 cars = 9000m= 9km
So now we are up to a 9+2.5=11.5km line of cars PER BUS!!
I would argue you can get better bus headway than that right now, but if a bus has its own lane you get faster average speed, which means you have less buses on the route at any one point, which means you can keep the original number of buses and run them with high frequency/smaller headway.
Cars will never be able to compete with public transport with dedicated right of way. If only cars would get out of the damn way of buses and light rail.
Feel free to show me I'm wrong though, happy to learn.
60m following distance is quite optimistic, the bus's stops count for something, and the only way you're getting 150 people on a bus is with the majority as standees, so you're comparing luxury living-room couches to a sardine can, and the sardine can isn't even doing that well on capacity.
I agree that in a theoretical universe with i.e. 2-minute bus headways, the bus wins hands down, but I'm not optimistic that any American BRT project will even try for better than 15.
My pet peeve is Livingston St. in Brooklyn, where 5 different bus lines temporarily converge. At rush hour it's common to see 2-3 buses (each one standing room only) with every traffic light cycle (so every 90 sec or so; a bus every 30 sec). The bus lane is completely unenforced - double parking in the bus lane and general traffic lane is more common than bus lane enforcement. Enforcing it would not only quadruple the commute speed for the hundreds of people per minute on buses, it would also speed up traffic for everyone who has to wait behind buses stopping for passengers; but god forbid placard holders obey the rules that apply to their placards.
Oh, and if you tried to replace those buses with individual cars, even at 4 people per car, it'd take about 2 blocks worth of cars bumper to bumper for each bus. They would not only not fit on the street, they'd stretch for miles down neighboring Flatbush, even if Flatbush weren't already bumper to bumper itself.
The solution to traffic congestion is moving more people per vehicle. Transit does that. The more efficient transit is, the more people take it. You add a bus lane and enforce it, people start taking the bus more. Then it makes economic sense to run more buses to keep those lanes even busier.
Hmm. I double-checked; the lines I've depended on in Chicago and San Francisco get to 9-minute frequency at best. I guess this is another axis on which New York destroys the competition.
You could argue time spent at the start/end however. Walking to/from the bus stop or finding/paying for parking. From my experience, my downtown walk from transit to work is very short, on the order of a few minutes.
There are also larger societal reasons to support transit over cars, even if the math doesn't immediately work out:
1. It's healthier for people ("active" transportation)
2. A functioning transit system will attract more ridership and a bus lane is scalable in exactly the way you pointed out.
3. It's environmentally friendly, locally (smog) and globally (carbon)
4. It's safer for society. Car crashes are a significant cause of death.
If transit planners actually took increased ridership as a reason to increase service, that might be relevant. As it stands, the revenue from crush-loaded commuter routes in my area is spent on any and all political priorities (concessions to labor, subsidized fares for favored groups, running highly frequent empty buses where no one wants them) other than the popular routes themselves.
It could actually be the case that the gentrifiers are deliberately increasing their transit utilization from zero (just not enough to make up for the loss due to displacement), and displaced populations still want to be transit users, but can't afford areas with good transit anymore.
When a bus is faster than a car, including the last mile time - hopefully people will make the rational choice. This is why I think dedicated bus lanes are important - they are a cheap and cost effective method of increasing transport ridership and also increasing throughput.
A major reason why vehicle-miles traveled increased is that constructing new housing in Los Angelos is illegal. People still wanted to join the city, but now they must commute in from further and further away.
Congestion is the inevitable result. Housing policy and transportation policy are inextricably tied.
If I recall correctly, the main arguments is that it basically just turns into another tax and doesn't necessarily improve congestion. In theory, for congestion pricing to work, at least in the short run, you want people with flexible schedules or less "important" reasons to be on the road to reschedule or cancel their trips for everyone else. The problem is that the congestion taxes (so far) don't end up paying people for driving another time. And they don't necessarily pay for new and better infrastructure.
If it costs me a $20 congestion charge to commute to work, but a $10 train ticket or $4 bus ride, those cheaper alternatives become viable options even if they increase total travel time.
This would force employers to look at flexible hours, work from home, etc., to keep employees.
Ive often thought how strange it is that the marginal use of a road is free...which can cause waste, abuse of the commons, etc.
It's also strange to be on a high floor in SF, CHI, NYC, etc., And look down at the grid of streets that could be valuable real estate...yet something like 50% of all and (and the air space above) is dedicated to hundred-year-old technology!
Costing employee commute time hasn't kindled such a change. Why would employee taxes do it?
A simple mechanism might be to start classifying commuting as a form of work for hire and require compensation (perhaps at half rate?) for the work.
People are no more rational about making small purchases than they are about providing the necessary funds through taxation.
I suspect most people intuitively grasp that having freely accessible public roadways is well worth the cost.
2. Why do people always jump to thinking road pricing will be extremely expensive? Outside of rush hours, it would probably still be free almost everywhere, and it should offset other road financing costs motorist - rich and poor - currently pay.
[0] http://www.nascsp.org/data/files/csbg_publications/issue_bri...
And I'd add that I think the notion that society runs on incentives for performance is a very narrow view. How many people here picked software as a profession because it would maximize lifetime income, versus it being a thing that they really loved? It's always some of both, surely. And more.
However, it could be done such that residents are exempt and even strayers will only get charged after X trips.
Edit: Funding road maintenance. Perhaps there should be another way to determine who pays for and funds new roads.
An 18-wheeler isn't on a sightseeing trip; it's transporting something of value somewhere that can't get from A to B otherwise.
Any given sedan on the other hand is typically transporting a single person that can either use different modes of transportation or simply opt not to go from A to B.
Why should the 18-wheeler be taxed progressively higher? It ultimately generates more tax revenue already than the sedan, and there are no realistic alternatives at this point in time.
Ultimately I like the idea of using weight. We have weigh-in-motion scales already, and the relationship between weight and road damage is well understood.
More broadly, trying to figure out a priori what is and is not useful for society is pointless. Moralizing economic decisions never works.
Just charge people for the costs they incur and the optimally beneficial configuration will emerge on its own.
The kind of thinking that concludes that it's somehow wrong to charge two people with differing incomes the same amount of money for the same good is the kind of thinking that taken to its logical conclusion leads us to forcible leveling of material wealth and central economic planning. The experience of the 20th century demonstrates that this approach does not work.
It's almost like some purchases function differently than others, and reasonable people might choose situationally varying models/incentives when considering social policy decisions.
What? We subsidize food all the time.
> Last week City Councilmember David Ryu imploring the city's attorney to take some form of unspecified legal action against the app.
So they want to take legal action against an app that tells people they can use public routes which they didn't know about because the locals along those routes don't like the additional traffic?
Sounds like they're saying "We don't want you to know you can use this road because we don't like having additional traffic". And they want to take legal action to enforce it.
What a joke.
1. Some side street isn't designed to handle the volume of traffic caused by this and is likely to wear out the roads much quicker
2. People coming off the highway might not know they're entering a residential street and don't respect the slower speed limit
3. Increased traffic in a residential neighborhood in general leads to less safe streets, poorer air quality, etc.
Of course, the fixes should probably be along the lines of a speed trap, additional public transportation, putting some forethought into city planning, etc. and not a lawsuit.
On one hand I'm sympathetic to these people (my wife and I are house-shopping and one of our factors is the house being on a quiet road, also I don't particularly like out-of-state drivers in my town, for example New Yorkers don't realize you can turn on red in Connecticut, drives me nuts), on the other hand I can't be late to my shrink sessions - my guy ain't cheap!
My first instinct is to want to punish people like you for choosing a lifestyle that is so outrageously unfriendly for the environment, but my frustration is tempered by the fact that your hellish commute is probably punishment enough.
I don't know why but that never occurred to me until now. So surely this isn't the only related area in which I have room for improvement.
That's all we're asking. As I'm typing this, another car has blasted through the stop signs at well over the 25mph posted limit. Time to give another call to the local PD.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2011/04/26/to-get-safer-streets-...
Really, for our street - which goes between a rural highway and a major local artery - the only solutions are to give drivers another more convenient way to cut through, or to shut off the entrance from the highway, forcing them to go another 1/4 mile to the stop light as intended.
I saw an article talking about we often look at day-to-day congestion, but they looked at how different cities dealt with interruptions better than others. Cities with lots of back roads faired a lot better during a road closure, while other cities just stopped.
What is bizarre about this? This is the empirical approved solution for this: More and better streets have cause more traffic, fewer and worse have less. If you want less trafic this strategy is as good as it gets. And if people want few trafic that what politics should do. I'd guess a website called "reason.com" would like empirical data, and science, but they seem to care about some anecdotes.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/06/21/the-science-is-clear-...
At that time, most of the people who used them were truck drivers, and the 12th-century village's main road was about 3 inches too narrow to allow a truck through.
A wedged truck on main street a week for 8 months, and people got pretty cranky about it.
I'm not sure what ever happened, though.
I think you accidentally a word there.
"A wedged truck on main street [each] week for eight months" reads a little better, but I don't think what the parent comment said was technically incorrectly written.
In a nutshell, the problem with Waze is that it encourages drivers to shift from arterials to collector roads, where they very often proceed to drive in flagrant violation of safety standards. Getting drivers to not do that is challenging (and this problem predates Waze). Speed bumps don't meaningfully slow people down. Even prohibiting the through movement in a T intersection by means of an island doesn't work--people will happily drive over the curb to do so. By routing people down roads that are not designed for this traffic, Waze is pretty close to being complicit in these safety violations.
The proximate cause of this furor is that there is a street in LA that is too steep to be safe for through traffic, yet Waze is happily routing people along the street. Waze's response is, effectively, it's legal for through traffic, so Waze doesn't have to do anything, with the underlying reasoning being that it doesn't want to have to deal with everyone demanding special treatment.
Waze's attitude is, quite frankly, irresponsible. What they could do--and should be doing--is to look at potential factors that impact safety and update they app to not route people on roads that are clearly unsafe (Google's maps already have the ability to report grade on roads, for example). In fact, that's what the LA council is basically doing: they're looking to see if Waze could be doing more, and in the likely case they find that Waze is indeed not doing enough, finding some mechanism to compel Waze to do more.
The other element in play here is a complete about congestion. The truth is... you can't fix congestion. In transportation theory, there's an element called induced demand: if travel time improves in a corridor, then that induces people to take extra trips, often returning it fairly quickly to the same level of congestion. What many cities have realized is that trying to provide sufficient road capacity to meet demand is a game lost before they've even begun, and instead focused their efforts on trying to coax better utilization of current corridors (single-occupant vehicles on roads are basically the lowest-throughput transportation measures devised, except for Elon Musk's proposals which somehow manage to be even worse).
No it is not natural. it was invented half a century ago and maybe that hierarchy is a mistake. It creates artificial segregation between places that are geometrically near each other, especially for non-motor modes of transport and for short trips. And it creates natural hub chokepoints at every merge onto a bigger road.
I'm a big fan of the Manhattan approach -- just have a big ass grid with much less distinction between so many hierarchies. Bonus points if you make one axis have one ways with "green wave" traffic light timings (this means in low to medium congestion, a driver never hits any red lights! Like a freeway, but mad cheap)
The nice thing about a real grid is it is insanely resilient. There is a capacity to absorb a huge amount of thoroighput and route around huge amounts of temporary blockage, even if latency isn't great (at least in a high demand place like Manhattan -- in a more modest town it could make traffic insanely fast if one way green waves are used). Eg If 41st street is blocked, 39th and 43rd work, and if those are clogged, so does 37th and 45th, etc. BTW the fact that there is a linearly increasing cost to using a parallel street is a feature not a bug; it dampens induced demand while still making the capacity available in proportion to its actual demand. Just adding more lanes to a single freeway is not as effective for this reason.
I think artificially forcing traffic into scale free graphs with chokepoints every place you switch hierarxhy levels may have been quite a mistake. Those chokepoints are always clogged.
A scale-free network makes through-traffic impossible in residential areas. That is a good thing. People don't want commuters constantly driving by when their kids are out playing.
The goal of a road network is to connect everything, not to guarantee a shortest path from every point to every other point.
Manhattan is indeed horrible to drive in at locations/times when the roads are very congested. But I've also driven in plenty of sparsely-traveled grids where traffic isn't bad at all.
1. except for midtown core, pm rush hour amd near NJ tunnel ramps, during the day cars travel almost as fast as any other mode, despite taking up so much more space than the effecient modes
2. This is perhaps the densest wealthiest place on the planet. The demand for driving is insanely high and tje available supply of space is insanely low. And for some incomprehensible reason there is no limit placed on driving whatsoever. Any yahoo with any car can drive in and out and around manhattan and park anywhere all for free(1). Under these insane conditions you'd expect average speeds to degrade to where walking is faster. Most of thr time kn most of Manhattan this doesn't happen. It's a huge success story.
3. There are better ways to slow down traffic than by preventing thru traffic. Just narrowing the road works wonders. As a pedestrian / cyclist i care about this a lot. There are scary roads in manhattan (eg avenues) but the very narrowest roads that are swingle lane between parked cars prevent a driver from going too fasr for fear of hitting the parked cars.
(1) Tolls apply if they enter from NJ, but entering from new England or long island is free.
Most of Los Angeles is laid out in a grid. Just look at a map. Almost the entire LA basin is a grid. The stops at the hills of course but then a grid resume in the valley.
Have you been to Manhattan any time recently? Because traffic is really bad. And Manhattan also has a hierarchy. Highways - West Side Highway and the Hudson. Arterials - 42nd, 34th, 23rd 14th. And then smaller residential streets.
Also Manhattan is 13 miles long by 2 miles wide. Los Angeles is close to 500 square miles. You can' really compare them.
Latency is bad but thoroighput is amazingly good. With the high level of wealth theres no physical way short of congestion charges that manhattan wouldn't be clogged all the time.
Tbqh outside of the PM rush,core midtown, and the tunnel ramp areas, I find driving in manhattan during the day to be just fine. You don't go faster than a bicycle, but what do you expect? Thanks to the grid you are still able to make consistent progress toward your destination. When your vehicle size is so inefficiently large in such a dense place, merely matching speed of the effecient modes is a freaking miracle, not a disaster.
It's true manhattan has a certain amount if hierarchy but its optional, unlike a classic suburban pattern. You can still take 28th instead of going to 34th or 42nd if you want, and depending on how far you're going this may be faster. You meant FDR and West Side. These are only 6 lanes each and only contribute about as much as an extra avenue each.
Can you explain why LA and manhattan size or aspect ratio make them incomparable rather than just hand waving? I've thought a lot about how a green wave system can be applied even in a very square town.
No the throughput is most certainly "amazingly good."
The number of of avenues and major east-west thoroughfares is small compared to the number of one lane one way street. Throughput is decreased further by the volume construction that happens now, the protected bile line and dedicated bus lanes.
>"Can you explain why LA and manhattan size or aspect ratio make them incomparable rather than just hand waving? "
There was nothing hand wavy abut anything I wrote. Nor did it concern aspect ratios, there is nothing geometric about the footprint of LA at all.
The fact that Los Angeles is such a sprawl means that amount track miles it would now take to provide similar transit coverage isn't feasible. And probably never will be. There will never be a train that takes someone from Northridge to Culver City or from Westwood to Altadena.
> The number of of avenues and major east-west thoroughfares is small compared to the number of one lane one way street.
Uh, you're begging the question. Each of those one lane one way streets adds one lane of capacity, but you seem to assume they each add zero lanes of capacity. I don't get that. Zero != One.
Also, actually, most of those cross streets are two lane roads. They're unpainted in many cases except in midtown, which is probably why you think they're all one lane.
If you recount throughout available with both of those two above facts in mind you'll get an order of magnitude more capacity.
Also most avenues have 3 to 5 lanes. Time based regulations increase these in some areas, there are "no standing between 7a-7p" lanes all over town.
It may well be that you even live in manhattan but it sounds like you have not driven there much or you would have over time observed all these features. They make a big difference.
> The fact that Los Angeles is such a sprawl means that amount track miles it would now take to provide similar transit coverage isn't feasible.
Huh? You were talking about road layout not rail though. You still haven't said why, regarding well signalled road grids, LA and manhattan are incomparable.
That's not true though. Induced demand does soak up a lot of the increased capacity, but not all of it. Building more capacity does improve congestion (or at least make it less worse than it would have been had you not built more capacity); it's just that the benefit is a fraction of what you would have gotten had there been no increase in road usage.
See for example https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2003/induced-travel-st...
here's a radical proposal: improve public transit. it needs funding at the federal level. which currently isn't forthcoming, despite all the rhetoric about improving the nation's infrastructure.
It’s still better for everyone to have congestionned public transit, it’s just not a magic way to eliminate congestion itself.
an interesting corollary is that along with increased congestion for both modes, comes economic growth. when it's easier to get around for more people, productivity goes up, consumption goes up. it's really shocking to me that politicians don't get this. my suspicion is that a major public transit project generally lasts longer than a term of office.
LA is trying to build out transit, and started around 1990. Even now, you see lots of complaints (such as in this article and a few of the comments) about "why are you spending so much money on useless transit when the real problem is clogged roads?"
Don't go around calling companies irresponsible for doing legal things for the benefit of their customers and themselves. Social pressure is a terrible way to run a society.
I pretty thoroughly disagree with that.
Yes. There need to be laws. And sometimes those laws are very specific--like don't use this road as a cut-through during rush hour or don't make a left-hand turn here during rush hours.
But generally a society won't function well if everyone's attitude is that I'll do whatever I feel like so long as it's not technically illegal or I won't get caught.
I'm currently in Japan and can assure you that about 126'000'000 Japanese definitely don't share your opinion.
As a visitor I can observe that this system, which is strongly based on social control, seems to work pretty well in a really crowded environment.
I think the OP was talking about Waze, the company (so about Google, which owns it). Looking at Japan I can see that the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the company behind the Fukushima nuclear disaster, hasn't cared almost at all about this famous Japanese "social pressure".
You don't even have to do that. You can engineer the road, itself, so that people don't want to be on it.
The problem is that these same neighborhood people also like their own fast access so they oppose doing things that would slow down their streets.
The induced demand theory assumes road usage priced at 0.
Once you let drivers pay for road usage, it is easy to let supply and demand meet where traffic always flows well.
> In 2017, the average L.A. commuter spent 102 hours in rush hour traffic, making it the most congested city in the world
Having lived in Jakarta and Bangkok, this is extremely hard to believe. LA is horrible for a supposed first world country, sure, but it's nothing like some of the asian megacities. 102 hours a year? I'd wager many jakartans spend 102 hours per month!
Very questionable reporting IMO.
Building more roads does not make traffic better. They shit on public transit while completely ignoring any other benefits (e.g. cost efficiency, energy efficiency, safety) or the possibility of growth.
It was obvious that this article was bullshit within the first few paragraphs.
> the most congested city in the world
is simply laughable.
I would be surprised if they bought Waze, but didn't integrate it with Maps at all.
Try and safely pay attention to wazes route and ignore it sometimes, but it's generally correct.
And you can send audio prompts to a phone speaker instead of Bluetooth, unlike gmaps, so that's also useful.
The default view seems to be that government-funded highways are essentially a god-given right. If I want to travel 30 miles every day from home to work, well, somebody had better build me a 8-lane highway to get me there with a minimum of congestion. (Sure, maybe sometimes we'll implement congestion pricing that will cover a miniscules portion of the cost of building and maintaining the highway. This is still a massive government subsidy for people who drive.)
Bike lanes, on the other hand? Public transit? Those get the more typical libertarian viewpoint on government spending. How dare the government try to distort our incentives by spending millions of dollars to provide bike infrastructure?! (Fun fact: As of 2008, the replacement cost for all of Portland's bike infrastructure was estimated at $60M, the rough cost of one mile of urban freeway. I'm sure it's gone up by then--it's still a rounding error.)
It's genuinely weird how libertarians--generally not ones to ignore the effects of government spending on incentives--don't appear to notice that spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a transportation system that you can only use if you're in a car might actually, you know, cause more people to drive.
On the other hand, libertarians are not a particularly large segment of the population. The segment of people who merely don't want to pay for what they don't themselves use is a much larger segment than libertarians, and while it may sound libertarian at first glance, it's really not (they want others to pay for their needs even if the others don't use it).
Another confounding factor is that transit tends to be used by Them. And God forbid government does anything to benefit Them, especially if it doesn't benefit Us but hurts Us instead.
What sort of libertarians are you hanging out with? I'm not a libertarian myself, but most of the ones I have talked to about roads wouldn't agree with this. Their usual position is that roads should be privatized and tolled, and that this would help fix the externalities (traffic, concrete deserts, suburban sprawl) caused by "free" access to roads, if people had to pay their true cost.
Do libertarians think this will lead to rich neighborhoods having much better roads than poor people and think that's fine, or is there some reason to think that wouldn't happen? To my mind, the fundamental the difference between a free-market approach and a socialist approach is: if you want something to be cheap more than you want it to be fair, you privatize it and let the free market work its magic, and if you want something to be fair (for some definition of "fair" defined by the legislature) more than you want it to be cheap, you socialize it and put a bunch of inefficient bureaucrats in charge.
We as a society use the former system for things like pants and potato chips, and the latter approach for most types of infrastructure, and I wonder if anyone can really predict all of the things we'd lose from abandoning that. If every road I personally drive on were kept in good repair but a lot of the other roads in my town went to shit, I would be adversely affected in a lot of subtle and impossible-to-send-someone-a-bill-for ways.
Rich neighborhoods often have much better roads than poor neighborhoods under our current system. I don't know that it would be any worse under a system where roads were privatized.
Also, you seem to be assuming that rich people and poor people never use the same roads. But they do; most roads are not internal to rich or poor neighborhoods but are connecting different areas, and both rich and poor people (and everyone in between) end up using them to get where they want to go. So the question isn't really whether rich or poor people are using a road; it's a question of how much potential revenue there is from road users overall vs. what it takes to build and maintain the road.
> if you want something to be fair (for some definition of "fair" defined by the legislature) more than you want it to be cheap, you socialize it and put a bunch of inefficient bureaucrats in charge.
The problem with this is that it doesn't make the thing fair; it just means that the unfairness is based on political power instead of on economic power. And experience strongly suggests that unfairness based on political power is worse than unfairness based on economic power.
Do they? Better how? Maybe they're slightly better in the "potholes get fixed sooner" sense, but I'm worried more about poor/rural roads being abandoned because they're not profitable to maintain. Or worse, shunted back to government in a "privatize the profit, socialize the costs" scenario.
I'm curious to see a detailed plan if there's one floating around that has some steam behind it, as a lot of this of course depends on the details of how privatization is implemented. But if the argument starts and ends with "Well, privatizing things is inherently good, why should roads be different?" then I'm strongly against. If you want to up-end a perfectly functional transit system in a radical and poorly-understood way, the upside has to be a lot clearer than "I don't know that it would be any worse under a system where roads were privatized"!
Or, to put it somewhat differently: our current system is basically that governments own the roads. Well, if they own the roads, then they should take responsibility for properly managing them--which includes making sure the people who use the roads are aware of their real costs, and also making sure that those costs are reasonable. If I'm paying taxes to the owner of the roads in my area for years, while seeing no maintenance at all being done on those roads, I have a right to complain even if I don't think the government owning the roads is optimal to begin with.
At some point it's natural to wonder whether this is something they find ideologically necessary but don't actually want.
Funnily enough, the blame on Waze might be on point: we might actually be experiencing Braess' paradox more often now, not due to building roads, but because people are more likely to optimize their routes due to traffic-aware GPS systems. And in that respect, Waze could be causing network-wide congestion while simultaneously providing the best possible service for its users.
Of course if that were true, it would also mean that you could also blame the road network and that Waze is merely using it as it was designed. Then we get into the the philosophical argument about the drunk jaywalker being hit by a speeding car: You can blame either party for 100% of the blame, 0% of the blame, or arbitrarily apportion blame between the two parties in any way you want, and no matter what, your judgment will be a pure reflection of your biases.
Quick peek into the finance of the reason foundation: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Reason_Foundation
And for a good laugh, their headlines on public transport: https://reason.com/tags/public-transportation
What's your agenda in posting this comment?
Agenda a): building more roads and highways is the only possible solution to congestion issues, either implied or directly called for:
> The cause of worsening congestion, says Moore, is pretty simple: more people wanting to drive on the same amount of road.
> In 2016, that number had not budged much, growing to only 21,826 lane miles. In the same period of time, the number of vehicle-miles traveled by Los Angeles commuters rose by some 10 million per day.
> Doing this, says Moore, requires a mix of road redesign to better handle thru traffic, congestion pricing (whereby drivers pay a variable toll depending on the number of cars on the road on existing road capacity), and building new roads to meet demand.
> Some metro areas are already putting these ideas to the test. Washington, D.C., has built what are known as queue duckers...
> Ultimately, Moore says, Los Angeles needs to redirect its transportation dollars away from a little-used public transit system—which eats up about half of the city's transit budget—and into building more roads and adding lane-miles to meet increasing demand.
Agenda b): reducing car traffic kills local business (several places as well, please go through it if interested).
I posted the comment to highlight that this is not a researched journalistic piece, but one-sided article from somebody who makes the same point over and over, completely unsubstantiated. My agenda was to discredit the source as I don't think it's well written enough to be a good starting point for an interesting discussion.
If you want something really laughable, California's HSR would be it.
Another solution would be to ban subdivisions from connecting to two or more larger roads. The downside might be that delivering US Mail - or garbage pick-ups - would become less effcient.
Sloppy argumentation. Just becuase 10 million is a large number it does not mean the increase is more than the 3.5% increase in available lane miles.
"49 Looped Local Roads
Nobody wants fast through traffic going by their homes.
Through traffic is fast, noisy, and dangerous. At the same time cars are important, and cannot be excluded altogether from the areas where people live. Local roads must provide access to houses but prevent traffic from coming through.
This problem can only be solved if all roads which have houses on them are laid out to be "loops." We define a looped road as any road in a road network so placed that no path along other roads in the road network can be shortened by travel along the "loop.''
The loops themselves must be designed to discourage high volumes or high speeds: this depends on the total number of houses served by the loop, the road surface, the road width, and the number of curves and corners. [...]"
The conclusion to the story:
> Soon after, Connor went rogue. He experimented with Waze, confirmed it was sending drivers down his street and began filing his false reports.
> “It didn’t do much and within two weeks they stopped showing up on the map all together,” Connor said. “They were on to me.”
> The traffic flow began to wane when the road construction ended, Connor said, but remains three or four times higher than before it began. For some drivers, their app-inspired shortcut became a permanent route.
HN on the WaPo article from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11846722
You can coordinate with your neighbors to take turns. Civil disobedience can go a long waze to reduce traffic.... I gotta go!
Consider also the “you’re going up against google in terms of development resources and compute power.” That’s not a fight you will win.
Is this legal?
I personally don't believe Waze is to blame, I'm pretty sure it's google maps (same company) but only Alphabet has the numbers on both.
Sometimes I see a suggestion from Waze and can't help but laugh at my phone.
So I'm wrong to drive on public streets built with public funds because you feel entitled to it by living on close proximity? It might be inconvenient for you, but it's not wrong.
> Make all but the roads designed for transit prohibited to all but local traffic
As long as the prohibited roads are payed for by the locals, sure. There are plenty of residential complexes with private roads, but don't pretend like public areas are private.
http://thepressgroup.net/concerns-over-leonia-road-closures-...