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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."
Lobby the city to make it a dead end or stop complaining, those are your two options. It's a public street and it's too bad if you don't like people driving on it.
Or petition your city to reduce the number of streets that can be used to enter the neighborhood or to exit it. I the traffic commute predominately flows one direction, make the neighborhood flow the opposite direction, so that there's no benefit to driving through.
I've seen this done around shopping malls, sports stadiums, popular downtowns that have festivals, all sorts of places where the neighborhood itself doesn't have 'destinations' in it. It just requires a civic-minded neighborhood to make the effort, rather than to just sit at home and do nothing about it.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This is a simple case of knowledge as power.
Telling people they shouldn't use software to avoid freeway traffic is like telling black slaves they can't read because they might learn what it's like to have a life outside the plantation.
Knowledge exists whether or not you want it to and you can't force ignorance.
If someone discovers a way to improve their life in a way that is perfectly legal and legitimate, such as driving down a street in front of your house, you have no right to complain.
Where i grew up, everything was laid out in a grid, so cutting through a neighborhood was normal and no big deal. Now I live in CA, and EVERY neighborhood is designed to prevent that with curves and limited ins/outs. Very infuriating.
Good-bye
Eminent domain those house and get some more lanes in.
Probably better to put a new highway in off to one side or another, considering it's LA go with both.
No sir I dont like it.
The other component to the urban sprawl thing is the pattern in which the development occurs.
Some real estate developer will get his mitts on a tract of land, and develop a subdivision -- access to and from this new sub-division is kind of a "step 2: ???" process. So you can wind up with many randomly placed subdivisions with or without proper arterial connections to the rest of the city. and it's a clusterfuck.
I'm looking at you Phoenix.
Ugh, and if they do that, I hope they know.... I have been stuck in traffic many times for little more reason than the fact that so many places did this that there is only a single remaining route through the area.
Because of that, I personally look down on people who request such things, and really, do hold it against someone when they feel that their desire to see clear streets is more important than the entire set of communities around them needing to travel.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The thing about cool tricks to avoid traffic is that they only work if nobody else is using them
Broadcasting them to the general populace will make certain that the local govs will step in with one-way streets and speed reduction devices in short order
What ever happened to the idea of keeping stuff like this close to the chest to avoid ruining it for yourself?
Around here, the neighborhoods that were developed with all straight streets have generally ended up becoming poor neighborhoods. Those with curved streets and cul-de-sacs generally are nicer neighborhoods. Perhaps it's related to laying out the roads so that people that have no legitimate business in the neighborhood have no incentive to drive through it either, which would maintain a degree of exclusivity through a passive design.
The main artery streets can still be an organized grid.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
"If they have, they've obviously failed. Killeen said her four-mile commute to UCLA, where she teaches a public relations class, can take two hours during rush hour."
It takes her 2 hours to go 4 miles. That's her driving a car at 2 mph for 2 miles. You know what else is faster than that? EVERYTHING. That's slower than walking speed, definitely slower than biking, jogging, rollerblading, skating, skateboarding and anything else I can think of. I would *love* to have only a 4 mile commute in LA's climate. I'd never drive my car to the office again.
Strikes me they should angry at either the city of L.A. or the state of California for not investing in better road infrastructure. Waze is a symptom of overburdened roads, lack of proper infrastructure is the cause.
I'd also be curious to know how many of these folks may have voted against tax increases to fund road infrastructure.
In most states, it's just silly to use surface streets when there's a freeway - even in rush hour, the freeway will be faster. But California is broken, and they just don't want to build big enough freeways (though LA at least tried, once). Making traffic flow better anywhere is rejected with "but it will bring more traffic" (sure, in the same way building a hospital will bring more deaths). NIMBY for more lanes on the freeway. NIMBY for wider surface streets. NIMBY for everything. The basic understanding that, yes, you can build enough lanes on a freeway was lacking. As a result, it sometimes felt like the entire state was a bumper-to-bumper gridlock, every neighborhood street, everything. Meh, they have the roadways they wanted, let em live with it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That would be rather inconvenient for the residents themselves, would not it?
Why, yes, this is a great argument to justify selective enforcement of traffic laws too — tell the police to only ticket non-residents. Still feeling good?
Why is the site, that is all up-in-arms about net-neutrality — forcing private corporations to treat all traffic the same — tolerates the exact opposite sentiment, when it comes to traffic on public roads?
Unlike the network cables and electronics, the roads are actually ours — we all pay taxes for their repairs and upkeep — how can it be Ok for mayor and/or town-council of Western Bumfuck to limit traffic and give preference to local residents?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Zoning laws prevent you from doing what you want with your property... They are evil and, obviously, a magnet for graft and other corruption.
Houston, for example, is not any worse without them...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
FTFA:
Killeen said her four-mile commute to UCLA, where she teaches a public relations class, can take two hours during rush hour.
>4 miles
>Sunny LA
GET A FUCKING BICYCLE!
--
BMO
At least where I live, most of the road maintenance funds for residential roads comes from local taxes. So unless you live in that community, you really aren't contributing to those roads.
Now of course some projects get state/federal funds but most do not, including normal maintenance.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Kinda depends on what/who was there first
No it doesn't. The freeway and the side-streets are public spaces, and no one living on a public street has a right to demand that anyone else not use it as they like, so long as they follow the laws of the road. If you want a private street with no traffic, live in a private neighborhood (gated community), where the builders do spread the community cost among the homeowners. The roads were paid for by taxes collected from everyone. Your taxes don't pay for the roads directly in front of your house, and therefore you have (and rightly so) no right to dictates who can use it. Most of the road-work money comes from gasoline taxes, so its fair game.
Making traffic flow better will bring more traffic, even if you use false analogies. Every trip has an associated cost, and if you lower the cost for each trip by better flowing traffic, more trips will become affordable, and yes, making traffic flow better will generate more traffic that was non-existant before because of being too expensive.
Ladies and Gentleman, we have a time traveller from 1948!
Just so you know, that whole "Outlaw high rise buildings, cover the entire country in parking lots and freeways" thing you and Robert Moses advocate was tried. For about 50 years in fact. In fact, in most of the US it's still the default. The problem was it made transit and other alternatives to the car commercially unsustainable, drove up the cost of living, has had immense social and economic costs, and it's actually the underlying cause of the problem being described by this article, which is that too many cars are on the road, not too few.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The freeway and the side-streets are public spaces, and no one living on a public street has a right to demand that anyone else not use it as they like,
Note necessarily. There are many jurisdictions that have "truck routes" where trucks that are not making local deliveries are allowed to drive. There are also hierarchy of streets. When secondary/tertiary streets are being used like primary streets then things get changed. Secondary/tertiary streets are narrower/windier than primary streets. There are many secondary/tertiary streets that are restricted to local traffic only. Do you really think it is safe for commuters who are trying to get to work as fast as possible to be routed through a residential area?