Waze Causing Anger Among LA Residents

KindMind writes According to AP, Waze has caused trouble for LA residents by redirecting traffic from Interstate 405 to neighborhood side streets paralleling the interstate. From the article: "When the people whose houses hug the narrow warren of streets paralleling the busiest urban freeway in America began to see bumper-to-bumper traffic crawling by their homes a year or so ago, they were baffled. When word spread that the explosively popular new smartphone app Waze was sending many of those cars through their neighborhood in a quest to shave five minutes off a daily rush-hour commute, they were angry and ready to fight back. They would outsmart the app, some said, by using it to report phony car crashes and traffic jams on their streets that would keep the shortcut-seekers away. Months later, the cars are still there, and the people are still mad."

Comments

Re:Move to a gated community

[mrchaotica]

Yes and no.

It's more related to the time period in which those neighborhoods were built, and how they were built. Grid street patterns were normal before WWII, along with smaller houses (Victorians, Craftsman bungalows, etc.). "Subdivisions" didn't become common until the postwar era, when sprawling ranch houses with two-car garages and big yards were popular.

Not coincidentally, those postwar subdivisions were also getting built at the same time as the civil rights movement: at the time, black people were "blockbusting" in those grid-street neighborhoods, while the white people were moving out to the curved/cul-de-sac subdivisons to get away from them. In fact, the restricted number of subdivision entrances/exits, along with the higher housing prices (enforced in the zoning code by minimum lot sizes, which forced lower-density development) were, in part, tools to keep out those perceived to be undesirable.

Re:Move to a gated community

[mythosaz]

Waze only works if users are opting into telling their secrets.

It uses your actual travel times to determine the best paths to route other cars, and stops bypass routing traffic if the bypass gets slower.

You could lie to Waze, but the best way to do it would be to (a) build a reputation as a good "Wazer" by submitting tons of good data, and then (b) walk down your street at 3mph, pretending to be slow-moving traffic every day before rush hour.

Re:Move to a gated community

[Locando]

Widening freeways doesn't solve traffic problems. Short version on Wikipedia, longer version on Wired.

The problem in LA is more accurately described as too many people in one place, all having places they want to go. Other less dysfunctional cities either have better mass transit or a lot fewer people wanting to go a non-trivial distance. Hell, all you have to do is look north to San Francisco and Oakland, where BART siphons off enough demand from the freeways to keep them flowing much more cleanly than in LA, the only real exceptions being the choke points where trains are at maximum capacity at rush hour (the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube) or where the BART line ends where there's still a lot of commuter traffic on the parallel freeway (I-80 in Richmond).

Not saying that NIMBY isn't a problem — it's ridiculous how it keeps many cities/regions on the West Coast from having coherent plans that work for the benefit of the public at large — just that wider urban freeways aren't part of the solution. They were the panacea of the 1950s, but with the population of metro areas now and the much higher percentage of people who have the option to drive, that approach is obsolete.

Re:Move to a gated community

[HiThere]

Sorry, but I used to work at a transportation planning agency. Building more freeways DOES result in more traffic five years later. (Baring some major problem, economic crisis, etc.) It also results in longer commutes, as when the freeway is new people locate further from jobs, and then don't move again when the freeway clogs up.

OTOH, gas prices have risen significantly since we studied this, so it may no longer be true. But that's not the way to bet. People are still moving to the central valley and commuting to jobs on the coast. A better solution would probably be to improve the rail lines so that freight would make it easy to relocate jobs to where people want to live...but that's not something the Department of Highways can dedice.