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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
I feel like they should have the voice of Elvis as the nav voice for all the ghettos it takes you through.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"Predominately" isn't a word. You want "predominantly".
Actually it's spelled "Pedantic"
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.
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.
You should continue to make analogies just like this, openly and often. It will speak much of your breadth and depth.
NIMBY man, it either makes people on the interstate slower, or those in their neighborhoods. The result is someone's going to be unhappy that you're on the road. If said is the case, there's absolutely no asshole cred being handed out for making your life easier.
Don't like traffic going through your nehbourhood? Make it unmanageable for traffic to traverse quickly, which will affect you, but everyone pays for those roads, and everyone has the right to use them as they see fit.
Bye!
"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.
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 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.
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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
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.
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
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.
What I always find fascinating is that the biggest libertarians invariably live in areas with very strong and expensive HOAs - if not outright gated communities.
Here's the thing: you don't live in your own universe. Where your activities impact and intersect with others, you need to come to agreements on how to behave with those others. Zoning laws are just one way to codify those agreements.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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.
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.
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.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Up to a point: the complaint about zoning laws is that they're abused by Suburbanists, who use them to impose the following:
1. Mandatory free parking as part of any building, requiring that the development use 4x as much land as the actual building on it requires.
2. A complete seperation of business and residential development, preventing businesses from being close to the people they serve.
The end result is that the entire area becomes unwalkable, and impossible to serve using profitable public transit (thus requiring transit needs subsidies.)
What makes this worse is that after applying the same absurd standards to urban centers from the 1940s to the 1990s, which were impossible to meet and thus caused the elimination of most urban development during that period, people found it impossible to live in urban areas and migrated to the surburbs. This was used as evidence that everyone in the US wants to live in suburban areas and "wants" to be forced to drive everywhere.
There are still people out there, in fact, someone is probably composing a response to this post right now, who are so entrenched in the mentality that "everyone" wants to be forced to drive, they see attempts to liberalize zoning as "forcing" everyone to live in urban areas. I know this personally, I've been attacked for advocating such use of force when all I've done is argue for zoning liberalization.
Few people are likely to argue that zoning needs to be eliminated completely, and most - though not all - of comments along those lines are calling for something far less dramatic. No, you don't want to buy a home, then find that a property developer has bought all the lots around you with a view to building a chemical plant that borders your house.
But that's not what we ask for when we ask for zoning to be relaxed. We want it to be possible for developers to say "Let's built a walkable neighborhood with sustainable transit links between it and other similar centers." Right now, unless it exists already, they can't do that. It's effectively illegal.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
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.
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?