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Comment by koboll | Hacker News Reader

>This has created fascinating potential legal issues that may one day be litigated in lawsuits or class actions. These thousands of homeowners and renters have arguably been injured by Waze’s and Google’s successful privatization of formerly public streets.

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.

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> 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?

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.

I fail to understand how merely directing people toward a certain street amounts to encouraging reckless driving.

For one thing, Waze is using the actual speed of drivers instead of the legal speed limit to determine the travel time of a route. If drivers are speeding, Waze is basing its time savings on drivers violating the law.

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 strenuously object to the idea that the government should be able to stop the spreading of publicly available truths in the name of public safety, especially over a justification as flimsy as "encourages reckless driving". I would be willing to revisit this debate when somebody figures out how to build nuclear weapons in their garage, not so much before that.

How do you feel about government setting up speed cameras at all of these side streets and issuing citations to all speeders, even those 1mph over the limit, through dragnet surveillance?

I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with enforcing the speed limit in such a way. Perhaps one could question its efficiency, or the fact that many laws and regulations are enforced inconsistently based on the whims of whoever happens to be in charge. But those seem like small evils, relatively speaking.

They'd have to collect a lot of tickets to justify the cost.

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.

The government is big and can do multiple things at once. Ensuring safe streets is an important responsibility. Vehicles kill many more people than child molesters and drug dealers combined.

Opiods are giving car fatalities a run for their money.

Are you sure about that, if the speed is moving greater than the posted limit? Waze displays your current speed as a green/red value compared against the posted speed.

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.

Waze doesn't tell you what speed to drive. It just gives you a direction, and you're literally at the steering wheel. If you're breaking any limits, it warns you, quite loudly by default.

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.

>For one thing, Waze is using the actual speed of drivers instead of the legal speed limit to determine the travel time of a route.

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.

> If drivers are speeding, Waze is basing its time savings on drivers violating the law.

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.

This is true for freeways and possibly multi lane arterials. It's absolutely not true for small neighborhood streets, which seem to be the shortcuts at issue here.

It seems improbable, though, that Waze is assuming you're doing 65 mph on residential streets (which, presumably, are around 25mph legal limit) to save time.

It's faster to take residential streets if the freeways are completely backed up to the point they're moving slower.

From the article: “If it’s a single-lane residential street and the speed limit is 15 mph, but people are speeding through at 35, they will model the time off that data.”

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.

> Especially consider that the kind of person who is willing to shave off 30 seconds a commute by cutting through a neighborhood

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 can't cut through them.

Non-residents shouldn’t pay taxes to maintain those roads either then.

Streets have many purposes. They allow people to access their homes. They provide parking. They are bike routes, walking routes, scooter routes, running routes, skateboard routes, and driving routes. They are sometimes even places kids can play, or at least where parents can feel safe biking with their kids, or where one can easily and safely cross the street as a pedestrian.

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.

It's also a good way to prohibit driving through neighborhoods to explore them. Whooo! Keepin the riff raff out! /s

Where I live, the primary goal of blocking vehicle traffic from cutting through is to protect "neighborhood greenways" from getting inundated with car traffic. These are specially designated bike routes on neighborhood streets that are some of the best, low stress, popular pieces of bike infrastructure I've ever used.

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 road in a random neighborhood is still important to me even if I can't cut through it: The mere fact that I can easily travel to any destination connected by it is very valuable, even if I don't frequently use that ability for any single specific road segment. In addition to my own use, its very useful to me that other people I interact with can reach those properties (so that they can live near by and engage in commerce and friendship with me).

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.

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