Traffic apps turned L.A.’s neighborhoods into ”shortcuts”
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In London, we have been collaborating with google waze - we provide them with information at the local level. Streets that waze should not use for route finding (e.g. roads with schools) can be blocked for use by Waze. Both local councils and TfL can provide this data.
The main difference between Waze and Google Maps is that Waze uses real time traffic data. There are multiple map providers that do this in London. There is a plan to provide different data to different TfL data consumers in the future to try and get map providers to seperate traffic across roads (at the cost of surrendering absolute truth).
London is also host to discussions of taxing roads - this is unsurprising when the roads are mostly paid for by the cost of the London Underground (LU makes the majority of public transport money, but 80% of revenue goes into road, traffic and bus management). The London Assembly (who supposedly keep the London mayor accountable) have written a paper "London Stalling" to suggest road taxing related to mileage across London. This, they no doubt expect, will cut down the traffic. However, from my understanding of embellished models of Braess' paradox, this will only result in similar traffic (on maybe slightly different roads) with an optimum equilibrium between how good a route is and what the cost of it is - meaning people may just take longer to commute and pay more tax.
Do you mean that Waze uses real time data provided by 3rd parties? Because I have always had the understanding that Gmaps uses location and telemetry data from (the Google maps) mobile apps to determine traffic conditions in near real time.
Knowing about and respecting size and weight restrictions is usually a feature on 'professional' sat nav units [1]. Serious delivery companies of course pay the premium to get this feature - but occasional van drivers don't.
Google Maps has real time traffic data and the accuracy is staggering. I occasionally use Google Maps for navigation in the car and it even highlights traffic stationary at traffic lights and temporary road works as I’m approaching.
This level or real time detail really amazed me. I’ve not spent any time looking onto how they do it but assume they are continually tracking everyone with a phone, or at least running Google Maps Navigation, and using their real time location and speed.
But does Google Maps use real time traffic data to calculate the most optimal route in the same way as Waze does? As I understand, that's the main difference between the two.
Anecdotally in the UK I see Google Maps routing based on live traffic data. I also often get a reassurance notification "you are on the fastest route despite traffic" (and it distinguishes between "traffic" and "usual traffic"). Occasionally I'll also get a recommendation pushed to switch to another route which is faster
Google Maps' UI is tuned to show you alternatives and their ETA, and it's up to you to take them or not - Waze will just update routes without user input.
We like to think of all the NIMBY's and school streets but these types of "shortcuts" suggested by mapping apps is also what sometimes leads people into dangerous neighborhoods and tragic consequences.
At points where there are multiple route options it will indicate how many minutes faster or slower each option is.
Is this concept something you've come across in your work/field?
If not, any ideas for what is next? I hope to see:
1. Car free days over weekends in high streets.
2. Entire high streets converted to pedestrian, bus & bike only.
3. A move to a more bike/bus friendly city, see Utrecht [1]
[1] Utrecht: Planning for People & Bikes, Not for Cars https://vimeo.com/344373585
>One of the UK’s wealthiest councils is facing renewed pressure over its decision to block a flagship safer cycling scheme after it emerged the authority could not say what proportion of the people who wrote in expressing views on the plan actually opposed it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-44405730
>Plans to pedestrianise Oxford Street in central London have been "taken off the table for good", Westminster City Council has confirmed.
2. Sadiq Khan has already tried to Pedestrianise Oxford Street, but was blocked by parliament.
3. There are cycle lanes and cycle highways and there is a lot of development in the cycle space - and will no doubt be continued. Bus lanes and schemes to improve buses are constantly being tried, but their uptake is low, meaning that it is difficult to increase the service, as they are not very profitable
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/sadiq-khans-plan-to-m...
Page 128.
London Underground does bring in more revenue 2.864bn than it spends 2.041bn, and subsidises Streets and Buses to the tune of 0.889bn (with a little coming from media revenue too).
However it isn't the 80% claimed above.
Time to find out this: about 1 minute.
"[road tax] was formally ended in 1936 after Winston Churchill asserted the following:
[I]t is a monstrous assertion that any important body of taxpayers should claim proprietary rights over the particular quota of taxation which they contribute, and that all should not be brought into an area freely justiciable by the House of Commons."
https://www.loc.gov/law/help/infrastructure-funding/englanda...
(aisde; a driver claiming to have more rights to roads because they pay extra tax on fuel, would be like a smoker claiming to have more rights to healthcare because they pay extra tax on tobacco products. I can imagine that wouldn't be popular. "General revenue" is supposed to disconnect source from sink to avoid exactly this.)
Taxes on fuel used in motor vehicles (duties and VAT) are something like 30bn GBP/year in the UK.
London has about 1/6th of the UK's population, so let's assume 5bn/year comes from London.
That's 5x the annual operating profit of London Underground[0].
Government income and expenditure is fungible, so it's hard to determine precisely whether X is paid for by Y or by Z.
But it's clear that government revenue from London road users is much higher than the profit from London Underground.
So it seems strange to assert that roads are paid for mostly by London Underground.
Streets -£167m
Buses: -£722m
Rail: -£49m
Underground: £823m
Elizabeth Line: -£267m
Other: £9m
Professional Services: -£560m
Property: £69m
Media: £145m
Both of those revenue streams go into a government general fund and are not allocated specifically for road maintenance, because they collect about 3x what is actually spent on highway & road infrastructure each year. [1]
In short, the roads & highways are massively profitable.
London's buses however, lose nearly ~£1b a year, which tanks the entire public transportation budget, and more than offsets the profit generated by the Underground.
[1] - https://www.racfoundation.org/data/road-user-taxation-highwa...
> The total of resource and capital grants receivable by TfL in 2018/19 amounted to £3,016m (2017/18 £2,477m). [1]
Total expenditure on roads of £539m, minus Congestion charges of £230m, means that subsidies received by TfL (covered by fuel duty & VED revenues) exceeded TfL road maintenance costs by £2,707m.
The LU does not subsidize the roads. It's actually the other way around. The net-subsidy (a.k.a government's net loss) on the LU is calculated at 9.7p per person-km, compared to a net-taxation (a.k.a government's net income) of 3.8p per person-km for driving.
[1] - http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-annual-report-and-statement-of... (See Page 126)
They keep trying to expand the 405 and there aren't feasible public transit options. The few that exist rarely put you close enough to where you need to get.
At least in the US, I feel like this road design fell out of favor a decade or two before GPSes and smart-phones. Instead of smaller roads that get improved as traffic increases, they have dedicated roads for thru traffic and neighborhoods become rat's nests, designed to discourage thru traffic. Neither system seems to "grow" very well, but of course locals prefer the "modern" approach.
There was talk in my neighborhood of locals blocking off the road in the middle, which seems to make it more like the "modern" solution I've noticed in medium density housing and solve the "Waze problem."
That's a... very creative interpetation of what public and private mean.
If you don't want your side street to be driven on at 30 mph, then you can't drive on it at 30 mph either. Traffic calming measures are a thing. Make it even more winding, add road bumps, bottlenecks. Turn it into a 12mph street, and no one will use it as a shortcut anymore.
if you dont want to have a ton of traffic dont buy a house on a major road.
There is a street on the subdivision i live in with the same issue. it is the main entry point to the subdivision. people bought houses there, then fought the city for years over traffic?
they put up stop signs, speed bumps, etc.
they wanted the lower house prices associated with living on main roads, but then tried to redirect traffic elsewhere?
NIMBYism can be a problem, but it's still important to characterize the issues at hand accurately.
If it works, why not? Buy a lower priced house due to traffic. Get politicians to change traffic. Sell house at higher value now that traffic conditions or better (or otherwise enjoy the now higher valued house). Are we to suggest that it is wrong to encourage politicians to act in a way that benefits an individual?
It would be irresponsible and make their respective apps uncompetitive if they arbitrarily chose to not give me the best route to my destination.
You're not wrong, but Waze directs traffic down roads that aren't considered main thoroughfares. That's part of the issue. There are paths to work that I would have never imagined had I not used Waze, and plenty of those routes take me through quiet neighborhoods.
A good example is the shunting yard I encounter. Most of the time, trains are short enough that if they stop, they don't block the crossing. There is a short way through a neighborhood that adds a couple of minutes to your commute (in either direction) that dumps you out on a highway just on the other side. There are also two longer routes (one for north, one for south) that goes around neighborhoods but adds 10-20 minutes to your drive time. I wouldn't call the short route a main nor major road, but I'm sure the residents who bought those houses more than a few years ago didn't know that the uptick in rail usage would cause much more activity on their street. You can even cut deeper into the neighborhood to save minutes by circumventing the line of cars.
On a related note, I stopped using Waze after watching someone roll through about 5 stop signs. The driver didn't hit anything, but that moment made me realize that I was part of a neighborhood nuisance that nobody asked for.
I do think Waze users are self-selecting. People that are willing to take "short cuts" choose Waze. I often ignore Waze's suggestions and have had people in the car with me comment on the extra turns and backroads.
There's a certain type of driver who prefers to mostly "tune out" and take the most direct route versus someone who wants to get there with the quickest ETA even if that means a more complex route.
I image it looks at a combination of speed limit, current traffic and then if the historical data is faster than the speed limit it discards the historical data.
If that's what they want, move. Cities aren't for antisocial shutins. Why are they here? Go get a bunch of land at a great price in the beautiful quiet countryside. Really, I wish them the best. Melrose and La Brea isn't going to be a good fit, enjoy time elsewhere.
No Thru Traffic.
Posting NTT signs at entry points into residential neighborhoods and specifying even as little as a $5 fine would make entry for thru routing unlawful, stopping Waze.
Whether or not the city enforces these signs would be irrelevant, as long as the traffic laws were in place permitting enforcement. Their simple presence would require Waze editors to accurately identify all such entry points and force Waze to prefer the surrounding arterials. They are, I believe, requires to denote such signage to their maps so that Waze does not compel unlawful driving behaviors, even if some percentage of drivers might otherwise make the entry illegally.
As an additional possible bonus, by marking zones as NTT, the Waze algorithms would not only exclude those zones but likely also reject periphery roads near those zones, as their value as a shortcut would diminish further versus the arterials they circumvent.
As a general rule of thumb, the law looks dimly on naked attempts to subvert it.
How would it /necessarily/ require dedication of additional police resources? Are you implying that there is some actual or legal requirement for the city to do so?
If not, I don't see how posting a few more NTT signs is significantly different from the status quo, namely that there are already not enough police to enforce all traffic laws in all locations at all times.
Ultimately, if it can't be tamed by more tactful means, the proper solution will be to close one end of these routes so the go from being posted as NTT, to actually being NTT. Ruin it for everyone, and see if anyone ever catches on that their selfishness has consequences.
If you try to take actions that are not "no thru traffic", the area would need to have precisely one ingress-egress point, at the same point, in order to ensure that there are no one-way ingresses/egresses for thru traffic routing algorithms to take advantage. This single in-out location would prevent Waze from considering the neighborhood for thru traffic, at the expense of increasing drive times for residents of the neighborhood for all egress points removed. The political fights over this would be an absolute nightmare, as there would be a perceived risk of negative impact to home values for all homes near former egress points due to increased trip times.
Simply making it a traffic violation to "thru" a residential zone does no harm to residents and businesses, as they retain their free right of ingress/egress to/from their zones, and allows residents to request enforcement if an unusually high level of thru traffic impacts their zone for any reason (Waze or otherwise). That's why I propose it rather than more drastic alternatives.
The city should not be doing what your suggesting until they’ve solved the traffic crisis and provided actual solutions.
The freeways are parking lots. Housing costs in the city are insane. So workers are forced to have longer and longer commutes. And the city’s infrastructure crawls to a halt at rush hours.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.
It comes back to “why we can’t have nice things”. Abuse. Many systems work when they are not abused but break down when they are abused.
One could argue that every street is designed for the amount of traffic that it is able to support- that is, the one that keeps the vehicles circulating at normal speed on that road. If the main road is congested, then it means that that road is not designed for that level of traffic. The Waze algorithm is fine until it moves the congestion to a narrower road.
In theory, a well designed algorithm should direct to secondary and residential roads only the amount of traffic that doesn't congest them, not one car more.
And designed for isn't just about width and capacity. Its about robustness. There are many ways to build a road. Residential streets are built with less underlayment, cheaper surfaces. Because they will last for decades with low traffic. Burden them, and they'll collapse under the load.
It does actual damage to the infrastructure, to misuse it in the ways being discussed. Its not just a matter of "I prefer a quiet neighborhood".
That's the point of No Through Traffic. It removes your "right" to impose your externality on the residents adjacent to previously-quiet street. You are not physically prevented from getting to your destination and are reduced to the path you already took.
> The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
You are the few in this case.
For Google Maps, here are the directions for reporting illegal/invalid routing directions with photo evidence: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6194894
I was surprised to find with Google maps more often than not it suggests to just take that busy highway that is crawling alone because ... it really is faster. I've tried to defy google maps ... rarely do I win.
Granted google maps is wrong at times. During snowstorms it loves to send me down off streets that haven't yet been plowed or ... worse random county roads you do not want to be on during a storm. I think it inadvertently interprets "hey nobody is on this road so it must be faster" when nobody is there because that road is terrible with snow and you're far better crawling along the highway where plows will be or may have been ... or other vehicles have made tracks.
One of my current shortcuts that I've taken for over 10 years dropped off the Waze radar during the summer when traffic is less. With school back in session, I am now saving 15 minutes on my commute. However, once Waze catches on and starts sending folks down my shortcut, I'll be lucky to save just a few minutes. It is for this reason I don't let any apps track my commute to work.
That doesn't seem like it would do you any good. Either other people on the road are reporting their speed and location to Waze (in which case your resistance is futile), or no one is, in which case Waze will presumably assume that there is no traffic on the road and send more people down it.
So now I have routes that I know and purposely do not share with any of these apps. I make everyone in the car turn off Waze, Google, etc. If I am in an Uber or Lyft, I will just sit there. I once shared a route with an Uber driver and it's now filled with Wazers. I also have routes where I ignore the no turn signs but Waze respects those so I don't care.
Anyways- for the first month or so I used Waze religiously as this is a notoriously bad commute. I realized after a few nasty trips through Fife that unless you were among th very first few people to catch a rerouting, the roads people were routed to were painfully undersized to handle freeway traffic. I have not used Waze since and am very cautious when following Google map redirections.
I'll stick to arterial roads, thankyouverymuch, and take my chances. Once in France it sent us on a dirt road - the car with my other family got there 10m faster by sticking to the autoroute.
One time I was driving up through NYC during a heavy downpour where visibility was only a few car-lengths ahead. Traffic had slowed to about 30 mph on the NJTP and most people thankfully had their hazard flashers on. Then Google Maps decides to distract me and pile on the anxiety with multiple "press no in the next 10 seconds or else!" re-routing prompts to save at most 5 minutes.
Just yesterday I got a pop-under to "confirm" that a speed trap was still in effect, which of course obscured some vital information on screen for a few minutes until it finally gave up.
Demanding that your user take their attention off the road to fumble with a touch screen just to stay on the route they're comfortable with is dangerous, and if I opt out once it should at the very least snooze those alerts.
Having said that, I'm not a SoCal native but I've been here for over a decade now. It drives some of my SoCal native friends up the wall that I won't get in the freeway for only one or two exits, etc... I just don't operate at that pace of life.
It's one thing when it happens once in VA (a state I'm used to seeing lots of speed traps in) and there is no cop, it's another entirely when it happens in a state where the cops are the biggest speeders.
But, the whole reason I brought this up in the first place is because: 1) Google Maps is as mainstream of a maps app as one can find, and it has speed trap reporting, and it will also try to re-route you around gridlock, which I personally find to be little more than a pointless exercise in frustration, and, 2) I noticed that it (speed trap reporting) was actually quite accurate, surprisingly so, in fact, on _a_ recent trip along the I-5 north and then again south through Kern and Kings county (which are notorious for their speed traps, Kings specifically).
I don't generally speed fast enough to get pulled over, I set my cruise control at 7mph over the speed limit on the highway. It's still nice to know that there may be a speed trap coming up, especially if you're driving through one of the perpetually-under-construction zones on a California highway.
If it takes you much more time and effort to navigate traffic than the average road user you won't benefit much from Waze because any gains in time will be negated by the time penalty (relative to average) every time you need to do something that requires being aggressive (merging, left turns, etc). Similarly if you're driving a large commercial vehicle you should probably not use Waze.
So Waze probably is faster by a bit, but not a whole ton.
In my experience, Google Maps ETA has gotten to be frighteningly accurate in the past 6 months. For situations where traffic doesn't materially change during the trip, my ETA will be within 2 minutes of arrival even on trips of over an hour.
I prefer the consistent route and now Google almost never tries to send me the "faster" way.
It's as if users main priority is not to be held up. Users don't care if the journey is two minutes longer or a few pence more expensive, they just don't want to be feeling they are making no progress.
If rush hour were still actually an _hour_ rather than a smear that covers all of daylight hours and then some, happy hours and other 'avoid the traffic' distractions would likely see more utilization as an alternate means of avoiding the above problems.
I think you may have just convinced me to use Waze instead of Google Maps. I'd much rather relieve the stress of driving a bit than save a few minutes of time.
Well, actually, I'd rather not drive at all. But seeing as that isn't really an option, I'll settle for making it less stressful.
Just want to make the point that not driving is really an option, just one that most people look for a way to avoid. It’s all a matter of priorities and as much as most people say they hate driving/traffic, very few actually do anything about it.
Also, a lot of people just aren't in a position to realistically say "no" to any job that involves a need to drive.
- Moving into a smaller place in a city
- Potentially putting kids into worse schools
- Passing on many of the recreational and travel activities that require driving
- Passing on job opportunities that have better salaries, career paths, etc.
- Not visiting friends and family who live places you need to drive to
All of which may be the result of not being able to drive or making a decision to prioritize minimal driving over everything else. There are a lot of things that people prefer in principle but, when presented with the actual choices, they make tradeoffs that favor different things.
But Uber is way more expensive, local buses would add hours to my commute every single day, and I'm not nearly selfish enough to make my wife drive me to and from work every day.
Oh, and bicycling is far, far too dangerous here. Otherwise, I'd totally pick that option.
I believe this to be a very real and widespread emotional phenomenon. Not only have I observed it in countless other drivers, even as a quite experienced driver myself, I still feel it on a regular basis. Sitting at a stoplight for too long sometimes just makes me irrationally angry, and I will often add a couple minutes to my commute to avoid the experience. I know it's stupid and am trying to change the behavior, but it's difficult.
OTOH, it was responsible for getting me my only traffic ticket, for violating a (very hard to spot) no through traffic sign.
Granted, being conservative is probabbly the right call.
Nowadays I suspect not. Google has so much telemetry that it probably doesn't miss any real paths anymore.
Anything attempting to reroute me to save less than 5 minutes certainly isn't worth the grief of the odd turns, streets, etc. that I will have to navigate for the first time.
I wish we could set this threshold in the app. I'm happy to spend an extra 2 minutes on the freeway if it's a lighter cognitive load. Hell, if I'm on my way to work I might accept an extra 10-15 minutes. But, if I'm running late for a flight then I'm going to dial it up to save every minute possible.
I once got stuck in small neighborhood for 2 hours while the freeway was backed up and that was before Waze existed.
In Southern California we have massive urban sprawl most of which is filled with cul-de-sacs within cul-de-sacs. Waze isn't the problem it's just exacerbating it.
This is the problem: these roads weren't build for it and the neighbors are left with busy streets, noise pollution and an increase in traffic.
But they do, if the jam is big enough. Traffic signs literally exist to allow it - their job is to tell you how to navigate roads you don't know. All it takes to detour through a neighbourhood you don't know is paying attention and having a little patience.
The root cause of the traffic problem is the interrelated web of: Sprawl, civic planning failures (insufficient housing near jobs), lack of stable careers (getting long term housing near long term jobs), and generally too many people needing to move too far due to inefficiencies in our society.
In my experience traffic apps are imperfect and even dangerous:
- Waze sent me once to a shortcut via a very shady neighborhood
- Google drove me through an alley so narrow that I had to fold the side mirrors in order to pass
- Google twice tried to put me on a toll-road ramp that could only be used by electronic pass holders. As a tourist, I didn't have one.
That said, these apps provide huge value by telling you about road conditions (e.g. accidents) and routing you around them, estimating your ETA, and telling you how to get to your destination even if you miss a turn. I would not want to go back to the old way of navigating using paper maps and just hoping for the best...
I share your experiences with Google Maps and Waze giving me bad or actively dangerous directions. I learned to distrust those apps as a result.
The people getting extra non-resident traffic on residential streets don't benefit.
But let's ignore them and look only at current drivers. It's quite possible for routing even one car through shortcut neighborhoods to be a net negative, because they have to spend time leaving and merging back with the main traffic flow.
Those streets being public roads, they don't have any right to exlusively using them. Furthermore, a public resource should be used efficiently.
The examples I listed do not bode well for self-driving cars: if they rely on incomplete navigation maps/databases, they will make wrong navigation decisions and possibly lead the passengers into danger or a dead-end (such as an alley that's too narrow for the vehicle to traverse).
In cases where I don't know where I'm going, I try to set any GPS app to keep to freeways and arterial roads when possible, since those tend to signed the best.
As the secondary and tertiary roads start to back up, wouldn't Waze start to direct people back onto the primary road for the same reasons it started directing them off the primary?
The problem isn't Waze, or Google, or sat-nav in general. The problem is LA (and most of the US) has massively under-invested in urban planning and infrastructure. More housing built closer to work hubs. More transit options.
The part that really rustles my jimmies is none of the rest of the US seems to have learned anything from California's mistakes. As new areas grow, they seem to repeat the same failures that California made in the 1960s.
[1] https://slate.com/business/2017/06/suburbs-finally-figured-o...
Can you physically turn the streets into cul-de-sacs? Where I live a lot of domestic streets are cul-de-sacs presumably to prevent too many people driving past.
Oh sure, take that side street with all of the sunken sewer grates.
My mom’s street was riddled with potholes. We were happy when they repaved it, but blew it when they put up speed bumps.
Tucson and Phoenix have another alternative. The cities are built with the main roads being a large grid. Subdivision roads are twisty and higgledy-piggledy. It's almost always too inefficient to cut through a subdivision to bother trying.
I presume enforcement is always an option.
Another point, on my street there used to be horrible backup right in front of my house, but once the light near the school nearby went to a half-duplex mode, apps stopped recommending it as a sure bet shortcut. Once that happened traffic lowered considerably.
If only one or two cars are seen on the road, turn the light off. If more than that, turn it on and allow one car per green every several seconds. It will reduce throughput enough that Waze will automatically route away from it (and eventually Waze editors will have to figure out how to encode it) without affecting normal residential traffic.
For whatever reason, people don't always care about speed limits but they usually don't run red lights.
Like enforcing easy zipper merging. Put lights on both lanes that need to merge together, out there in the middle of the freeway. Turn them off when there's no traffic.
Then I got to sit on my balcony for 6 weeks watching the traffic cops ticket one car after the other until they stopped catching people.
Really, this is a design problem with the streets and lack of effective public transportation. LA brought this onto itself.
It's not unfair, and it's accurate. The design decisions the area chose as a whole, like handicapping public transportation, led to this situation. With robust public transit, you wouldn't have a huge flood of desperate car commuters driven to find any possible shortcut.
Blocking exits does not in any way improve the road itself.
It just inconveniences people that are improperly cutting through more than normal drivers.
The fact that through traffic is technically possible does not mean it is 'prioritized'.
Incorrect. It improves the conditions of the road for local drivers, as well cyclists and pedestrians. Which is exactly why Portland did it. Unless you have an alternative explanation?
> The fact that through traffic is technically possible does not mean it is 'prioritized'.
It shows that they've prioritized enabling through traffic over other concerns.
It's not all that different from road diets. Road diets usually reduce the carrying capacity of the road, making it "objectively worse", in your parlance, in the service of other goals. Diverters accomplish a similar function.
Blocking exits only fixes things through second order effects. The direct effect is negative. If we could stop through traffic via other means, we wouldn't want to block exits, but we would still want bike lanes and speed limits and road diets in residential areas.
https://padailypost.com/2017/11/17/traffic-complaints-to-res...
But physically making the street not be a through street is possible. Just plop down a couple of Jersey walls and you're done.
Check out how Vancouver made semlin, grant, and gravely forcibly "no thru traffic" here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/DFVJNDF2DftbFzpv9
https://www.centredaily.com/news/local/community/state-colle...
Traffic bound for North Atherton (bottom left of map) has to go down to the intersection with Park instead of taking Allen.
Easy enough to take a bike through them, I used to ride that way regularly in to campus. But I think it's worked well to not have cars shortcutting through the neighborhood at high speeds.
https://www.google.com/maps/@55.101503,-1.584329,3a,75y,42.5...
Can state law change this, or is this a federal funding requirement? (I can't imagine it's a constitutional requirement. Plenty of publicly-funded services from food stamps to the restrooms at Area 51 have restrictions on which members of the general public can use them.)
Whereas there might be nothing whatsoever wrong with such a law you can't legally fine or arrest people for not following instructions you were never legally authorized to give. Essentially anything you put on a sign doesn't gain the force of law.
Example GA went through some drama regarding that notably their local chief of police publicly stated
http://dunwoodynorth.blogspot.com/2017/12/dunwoody-homeowner...
residents in my neighborhood were looking for relief from this cut thru issue along with more enforcement of speeding, stop sign violations and trucks also cutting thru. I reached out to Chief Grogan to share the neighbors concerns and asked that he have the Dunwoody legal staff research the legality of enforcing the "No thru Traffic" on public streets as I personally see the issue as unenforceable.
I wouldn't be surprised if some neighborhoods or property owners also put up fake signs. Wouldn't be the first time.
Occasionally with less selfish motives
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kbnzvw/fake-street-sign-i...
I used it in my bike commute from Sunnyvale to Menlo (which also used pedestrian/bike bridges that cross the creeks that define the Mtn View / Palo Alto and Palo / Menlo borders).
Of course, these have the disadvantage that (a) they damage the cars of confused motorists [6] (b) cars stuck in traps obstruct busses anyway[5], and (c) large SUVs and pick-up trucks can drive over them anyway [4].
Another option is a powered rising bollard [3] or barrier together with some mechanism (tag, ANPR, keypad) for recognising authorised vehicles. Which avoids a lot of those weaknesses - at the cost of power and maintenance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_trap [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sump_buster [3] https://goo.gl/maps/epSrQ2641m6ccf6cA [4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-22352... [5] https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manches... [6] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-22/car-blocks-o-bahn-for...
In my northeastern experience everyone uses neighborhoods as shortcuts when the normally faster roads are congested enough that it is faster in spite of the lower speed limit and increased stops.
Assuming there are at least some out there who feel the same, it occurred to me once to try to publish/monetize these agony free routes but I realized it'd pretty much instantly lead to the Waze problem.
However, if you have to switch enclaves by crossing one of the choke points, you will get hammered by traffic.
Once I was taking my then-fiancé to LAX for an 11:30am flight. About 2-3 hours into the drive, we were on the 105 in completely stopped traffic. A man in a convertible next to us began to absolutely lose it, smacking the steering wheel with loud, desperate yelling “ARRGH!!” again and again. We decided he must have been late to a mandatory child custody hearing and would lose the right to see his kids—or something equally life-shattering.
There’s nothing like LA gridlock to give you a sense of utter powerlessness.
Some of these gnarly streets are in places like the Hollywood Hills, where people try and get around the chokepoint that is created by the Sepulveda pass. But plenty of them are in working class neighborhoods like Echo Park, like this very steep street: https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-echo-pa...
It is physically impossible for there to be enough roads to move 14 million SUVs to and from home each day.
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/netwo...
(And while that's an exaggeration, Waze has consistently been far more likely to send me down unpaved roads, ridiculously steep hills, and, yes, unprotected left turns onto busy highways, presumably because the residential road I was on was lower traffic than the parallel road one block away with traffic lights.)
But neighborhoods are left with all the negatives. Is it really worth it to route hundreds of vehicles through a small street with a school just to save drivers 1 minute of their time?
1. Add enough speedbumps, unsynchronized traffic lights or even unnecessary timed barriers to make the route slow enough that it's no longer optimal
2. Add cameras that fine anyone who doesn't have a permit to pass, which would be given to residents for free and anyone who pays a sufficiently high price
I think you are assuming a naive dichotomy between public and private that doesn't reflect the way things actually work.
[Ryu] told constituents that Waze would designate a liaison to work with the city, and then the company stopped returning calls.
Krekorian’s office reached out to Waze and the operators of similar apps and got “a complete stonewall,” he says.
Why the pseudonyms? “They all fear legal liability in case of a bigger accident or traffic situation,” suggested one Level 1 editor, who tried to obtain the email and contact information of a higher-level editor to no avail.
The time for "partnering" with arrogant/dismissive/evasive app companies is over. Municipalities and state governments have been dealing with this problem for 5+ years. Why is it taking so long to legislate?
No one WANTS to take a side street over a freeway. You do it because the freeway is jammed. This means the city planning has FAILED. The money has been misused. I read somewhere that homeless in LA are having housing built for them. Sounds great, right? The cost per unit of housing is something like $450,000 .
Crucially, this means that it's just as valid to ensure that people live within a fifteen minute walk to a grocery store as it is to ensure that traffic can allow people to drive five miles to the grocery store within fifteen minutes. Density itself can help traffic, so long as it is properly located with respect to jobs and various amenities.
I'm having trouble finding the source but I believe I saw the link here on HN and it was to an article about a city asking for Google's cooperation in regards to a sharp/blind downhill turn or something? Hope that jogs someone else's memory.
When I compare LA traffic to Seattle traffic, I describe the comparison as they are both bad - but LA is much more active driving. You can always get somewhere quicker by zigging left, then zagging right (usually through a neighborhood) because it's built on a grid, where Seattle is more passive traffic because there are choke points everywhere due to water / bridges / non-grid roads, which means zig zagging is not likely to save much time, or possible at all.
- tolls and fuel consumption (Via Michelin is great at offering 2-3 routes with different and realistic costs, but the app is an ad-nest and their navigator is bad; Here can avoid tolls but the UI is bad; Google Maps is useless if you want to optimize the costs).
- altitude changes (a marginally shorter road which has to climb and descent 1000 m / 3000 ft is not the same as doing extra distance on the flat ground).
- the shape of the road, prefer wider and more direct roads (there are many narrow and extremely curvy roads that can't be driven fast, and some may be very stressful to drive).
- the realistic median speed as an estimator (not the speed limit; sometimes it is set unrealistically high; also do not assume that all tarmac roads are equivalent).
- local and temporary traffic restrictions (respect car-free hours in some areas and restrictions on a particular kind of vehicle or engine).
- eventual stops during long trips
Google Maps is far from an ideal navigation app at this point. The only reason it is used, IMO, is the abysmall UI experience in built-in car navigators. (Anecdotal evidence: I rented a car last week, it took me five minutes to enter destination, and then I couldn't figure out how to interrupt navigation. Eventually just used the phone to drive around).
Tl;dr: Dear Google, Waze, etc., distance is not everything.
- Mark a street as "No thru traffic," or charge tolls (via video camera) to vehicles not registered in the neighborhood and not stopping on the street.
- Suspend the driver's license of anyone using Waze, and use that as negotiating leverage with Waze to give edit access to city planners.
What's preventing local/state government from doing so?
The second one is unethical at best, and would certainly require changes to state law - in addition to being somewhat unenforceable.
The fact that actions have consequences and the consequences for those actions fall somewhere on the spectrum between needing to find a new job after the next election cycle and getting tarred and feathered.
We live in a democracy. The people get what they want even if it's not what the "experts" like and/or non-optimal. People don't to deal with draconian state micromanagement of their route choice.
If you add capacity and it ends up being all used up, it just means you didn't add enough and should add even more if possible!
Kind of like saying that in a famine it's useless to provide more food because it's going to be eaten all up anyway since some people are no longer dying of famine...
Have you ever been to LA? 16 lanes of traffic and still clogged. Poorer air quality. Suburbs miles from work.
Better yet, have you ever been to China? They are already leaning this lesson of induced demand, as have Singapore.
From too-low fuel taxes to too wide roads, driving is far too cheap in the US thanks to these subsidies. Wider highways is not the answer.
In other words, making highways wider not only does not solve congestion, it makes other problems worse in the process.
The future is remote. Unmitigated sprawl is unnecessary and harmful.
houston has 16 lane highways and still has traffic. The population density of cities is simply too high to have cars be the primary form of transportation.
That said, the logic does apply to wireless spectrum, which is a limited resource. If we allocate enough spectrum that people can replace wired connections, there will definitely be significant and unsustainable demand for even more bands.
And the idea you can’t build lanes to reduce traffic assumes there is always enough demand to fill up those lanes.