Slashdot Mirror
Weary Homeowners Wage War On Waze
HughPickens.com writes: For many drivers, the app Waze is a godsend, providing real-time, crowdsourced traffic tips to motorists desperate for alternatives to congested thoroughfares but to some residents of the formerly quiet neighborhoods through which Waze has rerouted countless commuters, the app has destroyed their quality of life. Steve Hendrix writes at the Washington Post that when traffic on Timothy Connor's quiet Maryland street in Tamoka Park, MD suddenly jumped by several hundred cars an hour, he knew that Waze was to blame for routing cars around a months-long road repair through his neighborhood. "I could see them looking down at their phones," says Connor. "We had traffic jams, people were honking. It was pretty harrowing." So Connor became a Waze Warrior. Every rush hour, he went on the Google-owned social-media app and posted false reports of a wreck, speed trap or other blockage on his street, hoping to deflect some of the flow. Neighbors filed false reports of blockages, sometimes with multiple users reporting the same issue to boost their credibility. "It used to be that only locals knew all the cut-through routes, but Google Maps and Waze are letting everyone know," says Bates Mattison. "In some extreme cases, we have to address it to preserve the sanctity of a residential neighborhood." But Waze was way ahead of them. It's not possible to fool the system for long, according to Waze officials. For one thing, the system knows if you're not actually in motion. More importantly, it constantly self-corrects, based on data from other drivers. "The nature of crowdsourcing is that if you put in a fake accident, the next 10 people are going to report that it's not there," says Julie Mossler, Waze's head of communications. The company will suspend users they suspect of "tampering with the map."
We had something like this happen a few years ago.
Neighborhood kid got flattened because google maps told a trucker the grocery store on the other side of the brickwall at the back of our neighborhood had an entrance running through our neighborhood.
Solution turned out to be simple. We put up a big construction "road closed" sign at the front of the neighborhood and a signs warning things like "neighborhood traffic only, not a trough street, private road and unauthorized cars will be fined the maximum penalty allowed by law".
Now days the street isn't even on google maps or waze. You visit us with google maps entire neighborhood is missing. Just a road closed sign.
Keeps door to door solicitors out too.
The cities need to sue Waze.
Residential streets are given lower roadway maintenance budgets because they are designed to handle significantly less traffic than a major roadway does.
A significant number of Waze users will not be city residents.
Major roadway maintenance is paid for, at least in part, by state traffic authority funds, extracted from fuel taxes. Residential roads are paid for mostly by taxes on local residents. It is very plausible that excessive redirection down residential streets will pose an undue burden on upkeep costs for the municipality that this happens to, especially with smaller towns.
Waze is acting in a manner that precludes equitability. It is not being considerate of the consequences of routing large amounts of traffic through residential areas, and further, their public response to the issue has been openly hostile to being considerate in this fashion.
This means that they need a court to tell them that they need to behave properly in respect to a public commons, or else.
Whoa whoa whoa. Easy man. Don't need to go with the pay with your life stuff.
It's simple. If it's a public road, owned and maintained by the city / town... it's fair game. If it's not, and it's a privately owned and maintained road, we should stay off of it, and so should Waze.
Now if someone purposely causes an accident to re-route traffic, the law can already handle them. What they should do, is lobby and petition their local government to add stop signs at every intersection, and step up policing. That works pretty well, and when the cop shows up on Waze, people will avoid it, anyway. But short of that, if it's a public road, and people are driving legally on it, obeying the signs, you're just going to have to take it.
This sig intentionally left blank.
The article made no mention on whether the homeowner checked the Waze Map Editor to make sure his and the surrounding roads were marked correctly. For example, a road marked as a Primary Street type will be favored by the algorithms over a road marked as a Street type.
If the information is wrong, then fix it yourself, and change the routes of thousands of people. This is the correct way to combat inappropriate Waze routes: Make sure Waze's map data match the quality and capacity of the carefully laid out roadways. If the roadway capacities are not laid out well, then your problem is not Waze.
There's also long studies made to make sure the streets are safe with the given expected traffic, choke points, traffic, and the fire department has to check it out to make sure it's okay in case of an emergency. It's not an exact science, but shit like this can seriously fuck things up.
Add that a lot of buildings and roads are built on pure corruption (things that really should not have been built gets built on "special" permits that skip normal rules, etc), and you end up with no one being happy.
Then you have people in cities like SF and Boston bitching about skyrocketing rent and too few units being built. Why do you think that is? You're right: they can't stop you from using the roads. So they just vote to stop people from building at all instead. Then the rich get skyscrappers up and live at the top, away from the "peasants". And you increase the gap between rich and poor.
This type of bullshit attitude is why everyone is so stressed, nobody's happy, and we have such a crappy society.
Oh, and while people go "I have the right to use this street! My taxes paid for it!", they'll conveniently ignore the other laws they don't like, speeding, city noise rules, etc.
In my particular case, the street in front of my house is actually a private way, with a compromise done with the city long before my time to give an easement right to connect 2 other street for locals. There's a bunch of (legally enforceable signs, since we own that street) signs up, as you're not allowed trucks, passthrough traffic, etc. People will happily ignore those, AND the street is on Waze to boot.
If it went both ways and all rules were observed, there wouldn't be any problem.
for the road to handle a certain amount of traffic. In theory if more traffic was expected more money would be spent.
Actually, if this continues, I imagine what will happen is what happened in my old neighborhood.
I used to live in a large city that had a lot of residential neighborhoods, and traffic was terrible so people would be tempted to cut through them rather than taking major routes.
What happened was -- the city adopted a series of rules to actively tie up traffic on residential streets, in an escalating chain of snarling effects.
I forget what all the stages were, but it was something like:
- put in more crosswalks, add warning signs, make lanes narrower
- put in speed zones, create turning restrictions and commercial vehicle restrictions
- create more one-way streets, have one-way streets terminate in consecutive blocks forcing traffic to wind around in a serpentine fashion
- if there's still too much traffic, then the badness really started: deliberate choking points, raised intersections, speed humps, etc.
- and finally the ultimate measures: turn streets into random cul-de-sacs by closing off ends of blocks, or in worst case scenarios institute mid-block street closures
I know a number of municipalities do this sort of stuff deliberately already to keep traffic out of residential neighborhoods, but it tends mostly to be large cities. If Waze continues to route traffic this way, believe me -- more and more municipalities will catch on and start doing this stuff.
And having lived in a neighborhood like this for several years, I can say it's a pain in the neck. I'd be required to drive a circuitous serpentine 7-block route just to get home within my neighborhood in an area where I would only have had to go about 2 blocks by walking.
But it was still much better than having rush-hour traffic going by my front door every morning and evening. The money won't be spent to improve these streets -- it will be to set up barriers to make these streets so awful that people will rather sit in traffic on the highway.