Comment by floatingatoll | Hacker News Reader

Comment by floatingatoll | Hacker News Reader

It’s disappointing to see LADOT neglecting to use a road management tool already at their disposal to stop Waze’s abuse of their residential zones:

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.

And to what end? I’m of the firm belief that the good done by Waze far outweighs the cost to the NIMBYs. In LA we have a traffic crisis. Sorry but your government built and tax funded residential street is just as much mine to use as it is yours. I won’t speed through it but I sure as hell have a right to use it as much as the local home owners.

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.

Residential streets are not designed for heavy through traffic.

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.

Well that's not really what I hear the NIMBYs complaining about. "Hey our streets are forming ruts and potholes from the excess traffic! We need better reinforcing under our street to prevent this!"

Good! You can continue ignoring the NIMBYs then! You can both spite them and focus on the actual problem.

> Residential streets are not designed for heavy through traffic.

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.

Isn't that what Waze does? It recommends uncongested streets.

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.

Minor neighborhood roads are necessary so that residents can get home, but they were never intended for mass through traffic. Traffic near humans increases risk to life by way of accidents as well as localized air pollution (living within a short distance of a major roadway is extremely unhealthy in the long term, independently of the issue of regional air pollution that covers all of socal). Using roads for a purpose they were never engineered to serve is not the way out of LA's traffic crisis. But sure, saving two minutes on your commute is worth the cost of running over a dog or child now and then.

That attitude is similar to a rationale for public vandalism. It's my street! Why shouldn't I turn over the trash cans and spraypaint on the street signs if I want to!

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".

The 405 is what 6 lanes in each direction now? How much extra value do you get by ruining nearby neighborhoods? I'm not saying people shouldn't deal with the change, just that it should be looked at before writing off people that have been living there for decades.

You apparently didn't read the article. Traffic got worse after Waze, not better. Now the highways are jammed and the side streets which has made traffic worse overall and drive times slower. Waze created a worse problem. The solution is to create better public transportation and can more cars. There's a solution, I'm just sure you won't like it.

> I won’t speed through it but I sure as hell have a right to use it as much as the local home owners.

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.

What if Waze labeled these as possibly $5 toll roads? If the penalty to the driver is $5 that is never enforced, what is the penalty to Waze if they just inform users there may be a penalty (and maybe even add the ability for people to record if it is being enforced or not)?

If Waze labels a traffic violation as a toll, they will lose the moral high ground (“it’s legal, what is the problem?” negated) and expose both Waze and its contributors to significant liability - and risk being ordered by a court to take actions (such as “disable all routing within Los Angeles” or “provide a real-time data feed of all routings to LADOT for analysis and enforcement”).

> What if Waze labeled these as possibly $5 toll roads?

As a general rule of thumb, the law looks dimly on naked attempts to subvert it.

In Boston, Waze and Google Maps will often suggest routes that are illegal, whether it's an NTT zone, a completely closed road, or no-left-turn violations.

I encourage you to sign up as a Waze route editor and submit an annotation to the segments of your routes that are illegal/invalid with photo evidence, both to improve the quality of their directions and to ensure that the Waze editors are not corrupting the dataset in order to get faster travel directions. If you find your edits overturned, write letters@lamag.com & btd@boston.gov — they will both very much want to know that Waze editors discouraged reporting of illegal routing!

For Google Maps, here are the directions for reporting illegal/invalid routing directions with photo evidence: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6194894

Not sure that reducing thruway and adding tolls is the solution to traffic..in fact it sounds counterproductive.

Posting signs would also mean dedicating police resources to enforcement, which tends to be a pretty unpopular use of public services. The proper option would be for Waze to work with LA/LADOT to mark roads, but it seems like they are either unable or actively hostile to resolving the core issue of overloading streets.

> Posting signs would also mean dedicating police resources to enforcement

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.

The police would not be required to add resources to enforce these laws. But without enforcement the signs would make very little difference to LA drivers.

They do make a big difference to the routing algorithms in Waze. How many LA drivers are just following GPS directions now?

The whole premise of the article is that it only needs to coerce Waze’ routing. If the glut of traffic is just following the blue line, the minority that route themselves shouldn’t be enough to cause problems - or at least, they apparently weren’t pre-waze.

If drivers are not routed into residential areas by Waze as there are no thru routes for Waze to use, then they will be on their own to seek out and find ways to avoid highways and risk police citing them for taking residential zone shortcuts in the process. It won’t stop every driver, but it will curb the majority of them from ever finding or using residential zones as a bypass.

my humble guess is that the genie is out of the bottle: the vast majority of these LA drivers are daily commuters. now that these drivers are used to taking these routes, most of these residential neighborhoods will remain saturated permanently. removing the routes from Waze won't relieve much traffic pressure.

The article mentions a gentleman that somehow 'disabled' his street in the waze map editor, and described the effect as a tap being turned off. I think that's the goal here. Not "no traffic", but not "drinking from the hosepipe" either - that's what arterials are designed for.

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.

I believe the LADOT's goal here is "no thru traffic", wherein cars only enter a given "residential zone" when they have reason to be present in it, and that's why my idea centers around most clearly stating that.

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.

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