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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."
I feel like they should have the voice of Elvis as the nav voice for all the ghettos it takes you through.
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.
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!
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."
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.
That'd be great--if there was somewhere to walk. Or bike, or rollerblade. In a lot of LA, you're looking at a 4 mile commute where you would have to walk in the middle of traffic if you wanted to walk it.
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.