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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."
Google Maps used to send you down random side streets thinking it would save 3 minutes, which it often didn't (my least favorite was when it took you on a route that ended up requiring you to take an unprotected left through traffic, something that on its own easily ate any time savings and more). I notice they're a bit more conservative on that in the past few years; they only tell me to hop off the freeway and take a surface street when it's really going to save a significant amount of time.
The real solution for this neighborhood, though, is to complain to their local politicians. If the neighborhood isn't intended to be a through route, it's pretty easy to make it unattractive as a through route, e.g. by making some of the streets one-way. That's not uncommon at all in traffic planning.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
App or no app, traffic in cities and suburbs is something that is going to need to be dealt with somehow. Cities like Boston or New York at least have a workable public transit system to keep some cars off the roads. LA is totally different -- it was built around cars and is only now getting a very small set of public transit choices. Buses do nothing when they're stuck in the same traffic everyone else is. Whenever I go to California for work (either northern or southern,) it amazes me how much people put up with to live there. I would go nuts spending 2 hours doing a 10 mile trip each direction every day.
Some trends are encouraging from a traffic perspective, but maybe not from a demographic one. Younger people aren't buying suburban houses and having big families the way they used to, so it's possible cities will become denser like they are in Europe. The big thing that has to stop, especially in mid-size cities, is the suburban sprawl. The ability to expand for miles in every direction directly contributes to messy traffic problems. Urban planners need to look into reclaiming hollowed-out cities and first ring suburbs, and getting people to move back into them.
In certain parts of Montgomery County, MD I recall they placed DO NOT ENTER signs on streets that were obvious short-cuts. They were usually qualified with rush-hour times. In other words, the signs made them into temporary one-way streets that were against the short-cut direction. That's probably the most cost-effective and least annoying solution. The threat of a moving violation was enough to keep most offenders in check. Local residents are only mildly inconvenienced by having to circle the block. I suppose they could have put "except local traffic", but I think they wanted to keep it simple.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The solution is simple: speed bumps. Even though the cars aren't going through a neighborhood fast, putting a few speed bumps along this route will discourage drivers from taking it.
I stopped relying on Waze when it had me exit the freeway and then immediately re-enter the freeway just to pass a few cars. I thought, "Thanks, Waze. In order to save 15 seconds I just made several people angry."
In downtown Phoenix, there's a couple of heavily traffic streets that server the downtown corridor. They got busy enough that a decade or so ago, the city made the center lane one-way no-turns in the morning, and one-way the other way no-turns in the evening. 7th street - a mile east of Central, and 7th avenue - a mile west of Central.
[Phoenix is, largely, a grid. Major thoroughfares are every 8 streets, even on the east side, 16th, 24th, 32nd, 40th... and odd on the west side, 19th, 27th, 35th with the exception of immediately downtown where 7th is the major street both ways. Someone can say 35th and Camelback, and you know it's a west-side address.]
At the same time they make 7th street and avenue support an extra lane each way they put in HOV only exits on I-10 for 3rd street and 3rd avenue. Not only could you take an HOV-only exit, but you could take a less populated street. Those exits were so successful that the residents on 3rd street and 3rd avenue petitioned the city for speed bumps and roundabouts and reduced the number of entry and exit points to their neighborhoods to completely push all traffic back to 7th street and 7th avenue.
These same neighborhoods petition to get "no parking 11am-2pm" signs posted when restaurants move into their neighborhoods, because, presumably, they'd prefer it go back to check cashing joints and "tarjetas de teléfono aquí" signs in the windows.
NIMBY MOTHERFUCKERS!
I live in a somewhat exclusive neighborhood in Phoenix -- the Ahwatukee foothills. They're extending a freeway around what is often referred to as the World's Largest Cul-de-sac. I'm going to miss my little city island, but the price of progress must be paid.
My city didn't really exist until after WWII. A lot of neighborhoods that are now bad were built in the fifties, sixties, and even into the seventies with the grid plan, while other neighborhoods built with less rigid designs from those same periods enjoy a lot less crime and poverty. The oldest homes closest to downtown are one of only a very small number of prewar neighborhoods, and for that particular neighborhood, despite having the grid they're some of the most valuable homes in town given their proximity to the downtown white-collar offices and the entertainment venues in the area.
Not all cities followed the "white flight" model.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This isn't anything close to a new problem. About 30 years ago, I lived on a street that was severely in need of repaving. The reason that it was in that state was because the property owners along it pressured the city heavily not to repave it. It turns out that when the street was in good repair, too many drivers used it to bypass the bad traffic on a nearby thoroughfare. Keeping the street in poor repair meant that you couldn't safely drive down it going more than about 5 MPH, which meant that people who didn't live along it would avoid it.