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I'm quite happy to bash the rich, but I think they have a legitimate concern here. Freeways are for long-distance travel past areas. Surface streets are for local travel in the area. When Google Maps tries to throw me onto surface streets, I mostly don't let it do it, because I think a bunch of people zooming through somebody's neighborhood is rude and often dangerous.

There are the shortcuts that people in a neighborhood use. This is OK if 10 people a day use it. If 5,000 try, not so good.

I believe that's one of the complaints about the Waze app.

Also there are neighborhood surface streets and then there are high capacity surface streets. If I'd rather take 6 lane boulevards than stop and go on the freeway, why not?

And a grid pattern makes navigating a lot simpler. You head down a street till you hit a major street you know and then you know where you are. Getting lost in a twisty maze of local streets, all alike, is another deal entirely.

The article does expand on this in an interesting sentence.

> And I’m not aware of any maps that, for example, trace the safest sidewalks for neighborhoods in South L.A. or the northeast Valley—communities that have long lived with the kind of dangerous traffic that affluent neighborhoods, like the one where my family lives, now find unbearable.

While the author and I both agree that having safe neighbourhood traffic is good for local residents, it's an unfortunate property that only the rich have resources to do something about it.

Ok then go the speed limit, drive you like you live there and your kids are on the roads.

Its more efficient overall to use the available roads. As an LA native, taking the surface streets is a way of life.

More efficient for drivers. But it results in much less efficient land use overall, because more space is now taken up by cars.

Then they should be interested in making the overuse of cars "less of a problem" instead of "not my problem".

I mean, on HN the solution to badly considered comments is to grumpily reply to them, not to work to solve the societal problem of poor education in critical thinking. So I don't think we can really expect much more of others.

Sure, we can't all think big picture all the time. That's part of what discussion is for. And even if it's okay to be narrow minded or flat out wrong on occasion, we are well within our rights to try to adjust people's mindset if we are so inclined. Even if somewhat grumpily.

This is not a NOMs problem but a complete breakdown in planning to provide adequate transportation. The apps only exacerbated the problem.

The problem is that California stopped building freeways in 1975 and we don't have much in the way of public transportation. Therefore people end up driving at freeway speeds in neighborhoods with children and pets.

An interesting example is highway 17 which is the only freeway between silicon valley and the beach. On a hot summer day the entire freeway is gridlocked. Beach goers believe they can get there faster if they drive through the streets of Los Gatos. This shuts down an entire town.

There are plenty of stories about how we dismantled public transportation after WW2. I am not sure how true they are so I won't repeat them. One thing that is true is that eminent domain has become much more costly in California making it difficult to rebuild public transportation after we dismantled it.

Here is an article on why we stopped building freeways: https://www.accessmagazine.org/fall-1993/why-california-stop...

> Beach goers believe they can get there faster if they drive through the streets of Los Gatos.

Google Maps directs them there -- I doubt any human judgement would really find those residential cut-troughs plausible in the slightest.

I'm sure that absent the mapping apps a few antsy drivers would try diverting through the neighborhoods just to keep moving, but it takes mechanized stupidity to direct enough traffic there to congest the neighborhoods.

  Google Maps directs them there

Waze, specifically

Maps does this too, I've experienced it first hand (and in another post I gave a link to maps driving directions doing it which you can reproduce for yourself most saturday mornings).

Perhaps Waze does more of it but maps is by no means innocent of it.

Years ago the people running maps seemed to care. When I found maps specifically directing drivers to break the law (route through dulles airport in order to bypass the tolls on 267) a report to maps was almost instantly acted on to correct the behavior.

Today maps makes innumerable mistakes and creates enormous externalized costs including tremendous amounts of pollution, disruption of people's quiet enjoyment of their properties, and even occasional loss of life (see article on maps directing drivers onto railroad tracks) and google cannot even be bothered to respond.

> it doesn’t surprise me they’re trying to keep cars from driving down the public streets they live on. Is there anything the affluent won’t do to try to exclude themselves from society at large?

There are very legitimate planning and engineering issues with the traffic changes caused by app-based navigation. Streets are designed differently depending on the expected vehicle-per-hour loads. For instance, viewing distances might be shorter, intersections might be unsignalized leading to unexpected backups, pedestrian crossing would be less well marked leading to increased danger to pedestrians, schools are usually located on quiet side streets - an extra few hundred vehicles per hour greatly affects the safety of kids walking to school... the issues go on and on.

It is true that people don't usually get interested or motivated on an issue until it affects them personally.

Heh, as a child of LA, my personal gripe against Waze is more that it has taken away my secret routes. I earned those secret shortcuts, by suffering through traffic to learn them!

Also, I totally just bought a copy of the 2015 edition of the Thomas Guide out of pure nostalgia.

this really is the issue. I just asked someone who just moved here how they got to work and they described my secret shortcut that I discovered by bike when I was a child. People step off the plane and now able to drive the streets like they have lived here there whole life.

They are not trying to keep cars from driving down on public streets. What they are trying to do is prevent navigation apps as treating these roads as main thoroughfares.

> I hadn’t heard that NIMBY’s are also NOMS (not on my streets) but it doesn’t surprise me they’re trying to keep cars from driving down the public streets they live on. Is there anything the affluent won’t do to try to exclude themselves from society at large?

What does this have to do with affluence? As far as I know, this affects people who live near a congested major road but do not themselves live on a congested road. I’ve seen it in rich and poor neighborhoods.

It actually seems like it may affect less wealthy people more. Wealthy kids seem less likely in general to play in the streets. “I want to live on a street that isn’t full of cars” is an entirely reasonable sentiment and has little or nothing to do with wanting to exclude outsiders from one’s street.

Well, historically NIMBY's are only successful when they are affluent.. basically, you have to be rich to have political sway.

If NOMS becomes a thing, it's pretty easy to assume it's only the people with political leverage who are going to get special treatment.

> I hadn’t heard that NIMBY’s are also NOMS (not on my streets)

Maybe because you've been motorcycling lately you haven't noticed how extremely antisocially Google maps directs drivers to behave in some circumstances.

When a highway is congested maps will direct large flows of traffic off of the highway through dense child-lined neighborhoods and then back onto the same highway a few exits ahead, jumping the redirected cars a little bit in line with no net increase in flow at a cost of making the surrounding neighborhood significantly less safe and pleasant for its residents.

With this kind of mechanized sociopathy directing such a large amount of traffic it is surprising to me that we're not seeing more barriers and gates being erected around neighborhoods.

Edit: It only took me a couple minutes to find an example of Maps doing this right now: Routing from Santa Clara to Santa Cruz, CA takes HWY 17 over the mountains which is congested on the weekend. https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Santa+Clara,+CA/Santa+Cruz,+... At the moment google maps directs drivers to get off 17, drive through some Los Gatos neighborhoods then get back on 17 three miles down-- still behind the bottleneck (which is the mountains...).

Edit2: Sunnyvale to Santa Cruz directs traffic through a different set of residential streets in Los Gatos to perform the same zero sum line cutting, but perhaps makes a better illustration at the moment because the residential streets it selects are now all showing as dark red congested-- almost certainly due to its own routing.

Ah, I see another comment pointed out the exact same location: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20662510