'Cut-through' traffic caused by Waze app must stop, L.A. councilman says
mynewsla.com
mynewsla.com
Unfortunatelly, Los Angeles is built with 3-4 choke points to get from the reasonably priced suburbs in San Fernando Valley to the companies that pay for $100k+ positions on the west side and mid-wilshire.
Waze helps alleviate that traffic and I not surprised that a politician here in LA is so out of touch that he would recommend shutting down a tool most people use to get to work so that the wealthy can have less traffic noise outside their house at 8am.
Streets are public domain, and until I'm relieved of my road tax liabilities I intend on using any one I choose.
Your argument won't win in the end anyways. If Waze continues causing problems, residential city districts will just vote to put up "no through traffic" signs and start ticketing offenders. Or, like Chicago, they'll keep a strict grid, break traffic up with one-way streets, and put diode-like partial cul de sacs at the intersections of residential streets and arteries.
This idea is pretty old; Christopher Alexander writes about it in _A Pattern Language_.
I'm a little sensitive about this issue; I live in a decidedly un-affluent part of the Chicago area (I'm on one of the least expensive blocks in Oak Park; the block immediately adjacent to mine to the east is part of the Austin neighborhood. We have kids playing on our street all day, and, because we're right up on two very busy streets, we get a pretty regular flow of total assholes doing 40MPH down our street for shortcuts.
When I have to commute into the West Side I have a 1.5-2 hour drive ahead of me. Unless I use Waze, and I can cut that down to less than an hour. There is nothing quite like traffic in Los Angeles.
Also, you are assuming Los Angeles was designed correctly and anyone that lives here for longer than a month can tell you it has some serious traffic problems because of urban sprawl.
Move to Chicago!
There are too many cars on the road and five lane freeways don't fix the issue. Traffic has been getting worse year by year. If they just offered an appropriate metro, I would take it. If they had busses that arrived more frequently than 30-40 minutes, I'd ride them. Add wifi and I may never drive again.
Maybe this will be the catalyst to finally solve the public transportation problems that ruin this city.
Transit LA is irretrievably screwed by its design.
Traffic relief using residential streets is going to make things only marginally better for commuters (for the same reason that adding buffers to a router has diminishing returns).
Making full commuter use of residential streets is going to make things a lot worse, not just marginally but dramatically, for residents.
Meanwhile, the precedent that residential streets are part of the commuter transit fabric is eventually going to spread beyond the rich neighborhoods, right? That same idea is going to eventually harm lower and middle income residents of other neighborhoods that get coopted into the commuter transit system.
I think there are much more elegant solutions for traffic calming. Like this: http://i.imgur.com/Jn78gQY.jpg
You could say "none of your business". You'll get the ticket, and, if its really unjustified, you can go fight it in traffic court.
shouldn't they have at least some probable cause for pulling you over? And wouldn't lack of probable cause make the officer's case a "fruit of poisoned tree"?
and anyway, how about not living there, yet, say for example, having a girlfriend there or going for some appointment, like going to look at the bike somebody is selling or at a house for sale. My point is that without actually living in the neighborhood there may be plenty of reasons to drive there.
I mean, you can definitely try to talk your way out of it, and if the cop is feeling friendly, you may succeed. But it's pretty much all down to how nice the cop is feeling.
Your argument is going to come down to "I made a wrong turn and missed the sign that said I can't drive down this block". It's not that much different from the "I didn't mean to drive the wrong way down this one way street".
With respect to judges, you've got to remember that a traffic judge spends all day every day listening to people's excuses. "I got lost and took a wrong turn" is something they'll hear frequently in defense of tickets related to traffic control ordinances. In some jurisdictions, there are special administrative judges/magistrates who do exclusively this. They tend not to suffer fools.
I'm not saying that no one ever gets off on tickets like these, but if you look at the overturn rates for traffic violations, they're extremely low.
If you're proposing this as a way to avoid a justified ticket by lying to the police, all I'll say is, good luck with that.
http://blog.al.com/breaking/2011/12/no_through_traffic_signs...
It's possible that this particular township didn't have laws on the books making the signs enforceable, and the police and residents put signs there anyways. But unless Alabama has a truly wacky state constitution, that problem is a city council meeting away from being fixed.
Public transit in Southern Cali is pretty good if you work in downtown LA.
We really need to get serious about stopping subsidies for freeways and other outdated modes of transporation, and instead fund efficient, modern mass transit. Roads designed for single passenger cars are the steam engines of the 21st century.
Of course.. I believe most American cities and roadways are not well designed for commuter cyclists. Perhaps we need a serious look into the bike highways of Copenhagen.
http://la.streetsblog.org/2015/04/08/garcetti-unveils-sustai...
The problem isn't that that information is available to or used by travelers, the problem is that its true in the first place.
If your point is that the best public policy response to Waze is that cities suck it up and redesign their street grids or accept high traffic down residential streets, I disagree. The right response is for the city to enforce limits on how residential streets are used, which is exactly what they're going to do, because they've been doing it for decades.
That's part of my point, sure.
> If your point is that the best public policy response to Waze is that cities suck it up and redesign their street grids or accept high traffic down residential streets, I disagree. The right response is for the city to enforce limits on how residential streets are used, which is exactly what they're going to do, because they've been doing it for decades.
Cities have been designing (and redesigning, where existing residential streets weren't designed with this in mind, or the surrounding environment has changed, or new design techniques have been developed) residential streets to make them unusable for through traffic while usable for local and pedestrian/bicycle traffic for almost as long as they've been enforcing local traffic restrictions, and (re)design, despite higher capital costs than enforcement, is generally more successful, lasting, and long-term cost-effective solution than enforcement, because it has lower ongoing costs than even the rather porous enforcement that cities ever bother to deploy (much less than any level of enforcement that could even approximate the degree of compliance that is achieved by just not having residential roads inherently usable for through traffic.)
Personally, I gave up on the commute and just rented an apartment 9 minutes away from work and 5 minutes away from the new expo line (train line from Santa Monica to downtown LA) by bicycle.
Not everyone can do that -- it's harder when you have kids.
"Traffic congestion spurs realization that enhanced public transit is sorely needed in high density population zones"
instead of:
"City council continues to make short sighted decisions that don't help anyone"
Whether or not this is an example of the rich getting their way more quickly than the average person, I think that the point about residential areas seeing increased through traffic is an important one. No one, whether rich or poor, wants to live on a heavily trafficked street. (I believe that it is possible to create environments that contain both successful transportation infrastructure and livable streets for all people.) The answer, however, isn't to shut these roads off to thru traffic (an exercise in futility), but rather to create better routes for people to get to work. Whether these routes are better mass transit options, better new roads, or improvements to existing roads, they will all, unfortunately, be uphill battles against NIMBYers. Hopefully LA, and the US in general, can eventually come around from the car-dominated perception of the urban environment.
[1] http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=236446
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_City_Council_Distr...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Fernando_Valley#Property_v...
A reasonable hypothesis would be that greater Waze use would correlate to higher numbers of accidents in residential neighborhoods.
That is no more than information. That is exactly information -- information about the most efficient route from one's location to one's destination.
So, yes, blaming Waze is blaming information.
If there is blame to be assigned for residential roads being part of the most efficient route between two points that are outside of those roads locale, it belongs to those responsible for the design of the road system, not to the app providing information about the results of that design in the current traffic environment.
Nope. In this respect (transportation routes), it is quite literally and merely information. It does not make promises.
Also, "promise," meaning indicative of potential.
The "you could do it before but required alot of work and now the technology makes it so anyone can do it" problem.
Google made this famous by allowing anyone to learn more than people wanted other to know about themselves.
The information was all there before google but google made it easy for anyone to collect with little effort.
To the home owners point, I do find myself doing this alot with waze in Toronto. Instead of taking Gardener or Front Street, waze sends me through the CNE grounds on streets that i didn't even now existed. I could have probably done this before waze but the technology made it easy for anyone to do.
It seems like the solution is the do what they've always done, improve core infrastructure arteries and put up speed bumps, slower speed limits and more stop signs to help deter people from moving through residential neighbourhoods.
A some one looses a $3k exhaust system on a sports car to them B Someone dies because of slow ambulance response - Emergency vehicle crews hate speed bumps
Another part of me says, traffic has gotten bad because transportation infrastructure is bad, and a big chunk of that is this councilmember's job. So if he's complaining about the traffic, he also ought to be working on some solutions. More convenient public transportation, better bikeways, etc.
I've had this same thought using Waze to avoid afternoon traffic in Silicon Valley when it took me through residential neighborhoods with kids playing in the streets and past schools.. Overall, if you're regularly diverting your commute from designated thoroughfares through residential neighborhoods, wealthy or not, I'm gonna call you a self-absorbed jerk.
In my opinion, what's self-absorbed is buying a house on a public road that can be used as part of a longer trip, and then getting upset when people actually use it. If you don't want outsiders driving through your neighborhood, move some place which is off the beaten path, or where you can put up gates or something. This will be less convenient for you, but that's the tradeoff that comes from making things less convenient for others.
If you don't want traffic congestion you might consider not living in Los Angeles.
Being so huge and distributed, Los Angeles is pretty much impossible to bike, where as Chicago not only tries to be bike friendly, but actively encourages it. A perfect example would be our Mayor's Divvy bike renting program where you can get a bicycle for $7 per day and drop it off and any of the other hundreds of divvy stations all over the city.
"Better off" is a matter of subjective value, and the fact that lots of people prefer not to live in denser cities demonstrates that the measures by which denser cities are "better off" do not represent universally-shared values.
No, it doesn't, because:
(1) property is not used exclusively for living space, and (2) even leaving aside #1, you'd expect higher residential property values in one kind of area than another if the supply of residential space in the first kind of area was lower compared to the number of people that prefer that space, no matter what the overall aggregate of preferences was between the two kinds of space, so "there is less space in dense cities compared to the number of people who prefer them than there is outside of dense cities compared to people who prefer living there" would be a better conclusion from that premise than "people generally prefer to live in dense cities", even before considering (3) you ignore the fact that dense cities tend to occur in places that are desirable for reasons that exist prior to the density, and that density is an effect, not the cause of the desirability.
As for cause and effect, I'm not ignoring anything. Cause and effect simply doesn't matter here. Are cities dense because they're where people want to live, or do people want to live there because they're dense? It doesn't matter; in the end, people prefer to live there. If people want to live there because it's dense, then it's obvious that people like density. If it's dense because people want to live there, then that means more people get to live in a desirable place, and the fact that people try to go there means that it's worth the extra cost. Either way: density is better.
It matters quite a bit when the issue of desirability of dense cities was raised as support for the claim uphtread that "cities need to get more dense"; if desirability is a cause of density rather than its effect, the desirability of existing dense cities does not support the claim that not-currently-dense cities need to get more dense.
How about we offer acceptable public transportation alternatives such as a proper metro and more frequent busses?
Also, just saying "transit" is saying absolutely nothing without demonstrating that one knows the difference between the layouts of NYC and Greater LA.
Politics are stopping us from developing better public transportation options. Blaming people for trying to stay out of 2 hour traffic is not the right approach.
Or better yet, just evolve the corporate culture and embrace working remote.
Pedestrians and cyclists have already lost access to major roads (see invention of jaywalking, etc), but it was OK since we could still take walks in our neighborhood. If every road is open to its full traffic capacity, the only safe place to be is in a car.
No, its not rude to use public roads to get between points connected by those roads, nor is it dangerous provided you are driving in a safe manner (and, if you are driving in an unsafe manner, that's a problem no matter why you are on those roads -- just as much if you are doing it to get to or from your home that is on the road as if you are using it to get between two points that the road happens to connect.)
This is exactly the point and where the problem lies.
If I live on the road, and am one minute from home, and know that my neighbor's kid likes to ride his bike there - then I'm going to be very careful while driving down it.
If I'm still 30 minutes from home, and using the road to get from one 50mph main road to a different 50mph main road, I'm going to be in a hurry and not respect the residential speed limit as much.
It's human nature, and we can fight it by [1] having police speed traps in every neighborhood (expensive), [2] having speed bumps everywhere (annoying), or [3] adjusting the dials on Waze's optimization function.
You seem to present [3] as being the obvious and easy choice, but it's the only one that involves suppressing information i.e. censorship. That's a moral problem as well as a practical one: Waze provides a useful service, and if you shut it down or neuter it, you'll just get a dozen imitators popping up to take its place. (Never mind that a ton of apps besides Waze already provide the same sort of info.)
There are other streets designed to carry traffic. If there is a lot of traffic, you need to wait in line like everyone else. If you need to get somewhere on time, leave early to avoid traffic.
So, then, let's assume that apps like Waze do cause a larger number of unsafe drivers to cut through residential areas. How do we fix that problem?
Among the solutions:
(1) Increase traffic patrols in places where the number of unsafe drivers is high, and ticket the unsafe drivers (this should be part of the response to too-high levels of unsafe drivers in an identifiable location regardless of the cause);
(2) Identify and resolve the problems with the intended through-traffic thoroughfares which is causing secondary roads to be more efficient routes for through traffic;
(3) If roads are intended to be used for ingress/egress of local residents and pedestrian/bicycle traffic, but not for through auto traffic, then do appropriate redesign (which often just means auto barriers in a few strategic locations) that makes them usable for the intended purpose but not for the unintended one.
If my ISP wants to sell me a 50 mbps, my usage shouldn't be restricted when I try to actually use 50 mbps.
If a road is built in my town then my usage shouldn't be restricted when I try to actually drive on it.
The answer here isn't to tell private citizens "don't go here", or for private developers to add carve-outs into their apps for these roads, but to put pressure on politicians and budgetmakers so that they build better transportation infrastructure for all people.
(Personally, I think that private communities in the USA are a ridiculous idea, and are vestiges of codified segregation and redlining practice. Just using it here as an example.)
It's an interesting discussion where the frequent answer is to make the roads less functional for the residents (which is what redesigns that prevent through traffic do), because anything less and the road is being wasted.
But whatever the class of residents affected is, to mis-use streets intended for local neighborhood activity is terrible behavior.
Due to where things are headed technologically, it is only a matter of time before the city simply automatically charges drivers fines for driving inappropriate routes.
Complaining that people are using public roads that connect their origin with their destination to travel from that origin to that destination is, well, bizarre.
Some people would still cut through at 15 mph, but it would limit that traffic to the really bad times.
And it would slow down local traffic, who are much more likely to be using the streets at the time children are playing.