Waze Hijacked L.A. in the Name of Convenience
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This is exactly backwards.
The streets were effectively privatized before, via obscurity. It is Waze that has made formerly private streets public.
I mapped out the roads around my house before buying. If you live on a shortcut public road you’ll get lots of traffic.
Right but isn't that the entire point? People following these shortcuts don't follow the speed limit. They don't drive carefully, and even if they did the increase in exhaust fumes will cause premature deaths of the people living in these streets.
Just because the infrastructure is built poorly to the point where driving through someones neighbourhood is faster than using the appointed thoroughfares doesn't mean the solution here is to just saddle those people with the problem. The solution is improving infrastructure to where people don't feel the need to follow shortcuts, or at the very least to make sure there are no shortcuts that disadvantage some random part of the population.
To me at least it doesn't seem fair that waze et al individually get to decide to make some streets unlivable. That's not freedom, that's a tyranny of those with power over those without.
The complaint in my neighborhood that I hear is that the speed limit is 25 and 35 and it’s followed. They just don’t like the traffic.
They'll be more than "effectively" private if it keeps up, which reduces utility for everyone.
So it's illegal to tell people that a public road might make for a faster route than the one a person is currently driving on?
It seems like the real problem here is shitty urban planning. This is clearly a huge problem plaguing Los Angeles, in many ways beyond just this one. If you want to keep people off streets, pass ordnances that say non-residents can't cut through them. Otherwise, there's not much of a case against Waze here.
If doing so is encouraging reckless driving and causing public endangerment of the residents on the streets, why shouldn't it be? They're clearly contributing to a loss of safety. Especially consider that the kind of person who is willing to shave off 30 seconds a commute by cutting through a neighborhood is unlikely to be the kind of person who would travel the appropriate speed on said street without a cop and radar gun verifying it.
In some of the conditions that are brought up in these stories, it's not even really safe to travel the legal speed limit. (And reckless driving includes travelling too fast for conditions). Given the resistance of Waze to merely cut out those routes that are not safe for through traffic, it's clear that they do not value safety and I hold little sympathy for them.
I can’t imagine they’d use absolute herd speed as the baseline against the projected speeds of the herd’s speed was a greater value.
Are there really not more important things the legal system could be using it's resources to combat? There are child molesters and drug dealers out there.
Have you ever tried driving 65 when everyone else does 80 (and the law says 65 mph)? It's borderline reckless to do so. All sorts of people will be passing you, creating unnecessary merges and lane switching that decreases road safety conditions.
It's faster to take residential streets if the freeways are completely backed up to the point they're moving slower.
The article also appears to state that it doesn't model the load dependent throughput-- 'The instant the time penalties work out,” DwarfLord claims, “Waze will just as happily send a thousand Wazers down'. Which isn't surprising, since routing a lot of cars independently is computationally tractable but adding capacities to the problem makes it NP-complete in theory and much harder in practice.
However, it does give a reasonable ETA based on real world traffic conditions, and that's a good thing - if today on some street everybody's driving at 10mph then it doesn't matter if it's because of a traffic jam or unsafe icy road, Waze won't send me there.
So what should Waze do? Lie about how long a route will actually take, and pretend like the person is going the speed limit?
Here's a thought experiment. What do you think someone running late who's speeding and being shown a longer-than-actual ETA is going to do? Stands to reason they're going to speed up even more.
Just a point here, part of the reason maps sucks so bad is that it directs people on these anti-social second shaving paths without informing them.
Maps says turn here... but it doesn't warn you that it's turning you into an antisocial jerkwad (or that its advice is expected to save you 10 seconds but at the expense of a 5% chance of adding 10 minutes and at a cost of at least $1 in more gas).
Often maps suggestions really don't make sense, even ignoring the anti-social factors, once you consider N-th percentile times or fuel costs... but you don't get to choose, they choose for you. Even if you force a particular route, google will frequently try to reroute you back onto whatever they think is the most seconds-shaving.
Your option is to not use the map... which isn't really a great option, since much of the time the map pretty helpful.
Non-residents shouldn’t pay taxes to maintain those roads either then.
Not letting vehicles cut through a neighborhood street means the street serves one fewer purpose, but it means it serves every other purpose much better than before. Maybe it's worth it for some streets, maybe it's not for others. But your statement is a bit like saying you shouldn't need to pay taxes to maintain a school because you're not allowed to drive through it.
So here, at least, these efforts are a terrible way to keep riff raff out, as they make your street far too attractive to riff raff using non-motorized transportation.
A complete road network has greater value than the sum of its components in isolation, and this is true even for components even where you can't use them for non-destination travel.
Following your logic, any sub-graph of roads that can't be transited to other subgraphs should entirely be paid for by the connected properties-- and that clearly is not how we do things.
Moreover, the "if I can, I should" thinking strongly incentives making neighborhoods into single-access navigational cul-de-sacs, which creates worse traffic for everyone when the local traffic for the neighborhood gets funneled into a single choke point and causes congestion.
A month or two ago I saw an image on reddit from florida where someone showed that it was an 8-mile drive to their backdoor neighbor due to a lack of connectivity between neighborhoods. ... that's the kind of garbage roadway network design we'd get if we can only use raw connectivity control the load and character of use of roadways.
Guess what, people would absolutely get sent to the major roadways if (and only if!) those roadways would actually get people where they want to go, faster. If those roadways suck compared to the alternatives, then that points towards a duty of the major to improve those major roadways (which are obviously overwhelmed even after Waze helps by redirecting some traffic off of them), not a duty to drivers to simply suffer every day while sitting in a traffic jam on the "gov't recommended" route or the likes of Waze to keep mum about better alternatives.
The article mentions the 'LA Complete Streets Official Guide' listing which streets the planners designated as arterial vs non-arterial - guess what, if there's a mismatch between the plan and how people can reach their destinations most efficiently, then it is the plan that's wrong and needs to change, not the drivers. If you plan and build a wider, "faster" arterial route that's actually a huge diversion and drivers take shortcuts instead of following your route, well, too bad you wasted a bunch of money building a road noone needs based on a bad plan, it's not the fault of drivers that this road doesn't suit their needs.
The city was free to use its partnership with Waze to determine where to build(improve/widen/regulate) roads and intersections that would be a better fit for how people want to travel. However, instead of listening to the people through that data, they wanted to use it to tell people how to get where they want to be in a way that suits interests of city planners instead of the driver - and that's not how it works.
I think you are failing to differentiate between use and abuse. Roads have a specific purpose. Small, narrow side streets in dense, highly populated neighborhoods are not meant for heavy thru-traffic. Drivers using them for that purpose are, in fact, abusing them, at the expense of the people that live, walk, run, bicycle, and park in that neighborhood. In these instances, it is not that the city planners were wrong. The plan wasn't wrong. The drivers heedlessly barreling down streets never meant for that are in the wrong.
> it's not the fault of drivers that this road doesn't suit their needs.
You can't always get what you want. The desire to get to work 5 minutes faster doesn't overrule the right of people to have safe streets to live on. Unnecessarily diverting loads of drivers onto roads not meant to handle them is unethical.
If there's a mismatch between the planners' intent and the posted street signs, speed limits, etc - that's a fault of the plan and the planner's; street signs delineating how drivers should behave on these streets are a key part (if not the main part) of city traffic planning. Drivers have to obey the signs, and they don't have to obey some official's intent - so if some streets have lower speed limits or speed bumps because they're residental areas, then that's completely fine and both drivers and Waze will take that into account when routing.
But in general, if it's a public street, then the public (including nonlocal public!) is meant to be there if they want to; if it's not a private street of a gated neighbourhood then the drivers passing through have the exact same right to use that public street as the people who live there. It's not at the expense of the people who live there, it's simply using your own rightly deserved share of that public street instead of expecting that those other people have a monopoly on it and that you'd need their permission to share that street with you - if anything, you could label the desire to keep others off "their" street as doing so "at the expense" of these other taxpayers. You can plan and build non-arterial streets so that they're more useful for reaching local stuff and less useful for passing through; however, if the locals are allowed to drive through that street with x mph, then arbitrary numbers of other people are (and should!) also be allowed to be there on the same conditions.
The roads are public property and their use is constrained by law. The same legal authorities which can set speed limits can ban non-local traffic. That would overcome your reliance on emphasising the letter, and not intent, of the law.
Sweet. So you agree that adjusting the traffic laws and/or posting signs that say "No through traffic, transit to or from neighborhood properties only" would be sufficient to then permit enforcement actions?
Those signs don't exist yet because prior to waze/maps they generally weren't required-- common decency and limited patience with convoluted paths were enough to restrict through traffic in most cases.
Now that almost everyone driving is being directed by a mechanical sociopath it has turned into an issue.
Simply put: California has recognized our fair and even freedoms. You want to take them away? Molon labe.
[And in particular, the case law in California appears to be very liberal in allowing cities to close roads to cars entirely.]
I'm also super comfortable with closing roads to cars entirely.
Is that something you think is actually preferable to simply avoiding sending large amounts of through traffic on roads which were not designed nor are able to handle the traffic?
That seems like a cutting off ones nose to spite one's face. I don't live in LA, nor do I personally suffer from waze traffic (in fact, I have the good fortune of having been able to select my location so that such things will never be a problem for me) ... but I've lived in Florida where it's the norm for communities to be constructed with single outlets, and its clearly a bad design that leads to more roadway congestion. Yes, it keeps neighborhoods free from being speedways, but it makes driving and the community less enjoyable for everyone else.
I'm more comfortable with solutions that are even. If you want to install metering lights so be it. All will be equal under the law.
Our roads are designed so that some are arterial, some are access. The designs of these different kinds of roads are strikingly different, the costs to construct them are strikingly different, as is its durability to traffic. The impact on the surrounding properties are strikingly different as well.
Treating each kind of road according to its designed purpose is not a failure to treat the public equally.
Would you also argue that prohibiting drivers from traveling southbound in the northbound lanes is not treating them equally under the law? -- I suppose not.
But then why do you consider directing transit traffic via non-arterial roads, causing unplanned wear to the road, risk the the surrounding properties, and congestion at interconnection points to be materially different than driving the wrong way? The road is designed to be used a particular way, using in a manner contrary to the design can cause serious problems.
The law does not currently have carveouts for prohibiting transit traffic on public roads, as they weren't generally needed in the past and no doubt their enforcement would have their own costs (e.g. police stopping people to ask where they are going)... but such laws could certainly be created, and will be created if mapping companies continue to insist that they can ignore the harms they are creating by directing drivers to drive in ways contrary to the design of the road network so long as the law doesn't outright prohibit them from doing so.
With automatic plate number recognition cameras it would be relatively straight forward to automate ticketing of through traffic in posted no-through roadways...
I'll see you at the ballot box for this one.
I strenuously disagree. You seem to be saying that city planners and traffic engineers have to design with the constraint that a large subset of drivers will take the instantaneously fastest route rather than sticking to intended high-throughout roads.
I suspect that this would have rather poor implications. It means that little residential streets that happen to parallel major streets will get used at their full capacity whenever the major streets drop below 25-ish mph.
This, in turn, likely means that the little streets can’t safely be used by pedestrians and become unsafe for people trying to cross or exit driveways, let alone for kids who want to play.
This sucks. It’s not clear what cities can do about it, but blaming the cities and saying that every last through street needs to be widened is not the answer.
The problems of roads can't be solved by building more roads.
But banning Waze is just a band-aid. The real problem is that the only way to get around LA is to drive. The real solution for LA is to re-think itself as a walkable about city with real public transit options. There isn't enough physical space for everyone in LA to get to where they want to go in a giant, personal automobile while still leaving room for dense housing.
If you are interested in exactly how to redesign a city to make all transit more effective, check out the book 'Walkable City Rules' by Jeff Speck.
[1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/09/citylab-unive...
In many cases the arterials don't have anyone directly on them (or only commercial/industrial property)... specifically as part of their intended purpose.
In fact, if the situation isn't addressed in a fair and intentional manner a my vs your issue will be created: wealthier residents will erect gates, block traffic, privatize roads, or move to other locations ... and leave everyone else to contend with the mess on their own access roads, without the political air cover of wealthier people also suffering the same roadway misuse problem.
The navigation apps have no incentive to give you a worse experience by sending you down narrow roads.
Technology has unintended consequences.
Technology owners have feduciary responsibility to continue producing technology.
Negatively affected citizens make a fuss, claim they deserve more rights than other citizens.
Media creates hit pieces, painting the most negative possible picture in an attempt to look like investigative journalism.
Government either ignores the problem, or grossly overreaches, leading to further unintended consequences.
Chaos: Our protagonist, New Tech, arises.
Discord: As a consequence, the first antagonist looms: Unintended Consequences.
Confusion: New Tech is not dissuaded. It moves boldly, embracing what it sees as positive change in the world.
Bureaucracy: Unintended Consequences summons the evil power of Somebody Else's Problem, and reveals their true face: Angry Mobs.
The Aftermath: The Government steps in. They ban New Tech, establish a Committee to Study Somebody Else's Problem, set up a fund for Unintended Consequences, and violently suppress the Angry Mobs.
Recall that, in Discordian 5-act, the protagonist is arbitrary, and usually chosen to maximize irony, bathos, or confusion. Our goal is to remind the audience of how silly it was to think of anything or anybody as morally absolved.
The architectural principle of Southern NH is that streets are not organized in a grid but rather in a hierarchy. They add more suburban "pods" at the leaf nodes with resulting uncontrollable traffic increases at upper levels.
A street grid scales in an entirely different way in that if you build more grid you add both short- and long-range access at the same time.
A town I live near added "traffic calming" measures, in some cases draconian. (e.g. When the cop catches you turning towards the supermarket when you shouldn't be you tell him that you're entirely confused by the streets in the area, you blow 0.0, and he says he is confused by it too.)
As soon as traffic calming went into place, traffic got much worse on nearby arteries, particularly wait times at street lights.
My current theory is that a good traffic route avoids stop lights like the plague. It's inevitable that you will hit stop lights, wasting your time and fuel. If you go to places where traffic concentrates, traffic will eventually outflow the ability of cars to clear the intersection during the green cycle. So a single traffic light causes you to be stuck for several cycles.
If you think for yourself you realize that you can clear 10 stop sign intersections in the time that you can clear a bad pair of lights.
I don't apologize for any of this behavior because I am making life better for people in the herd by getting out of it.