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 are all paying the taxes necessary for you to have a road to your home. So get over it. If it was a private road, that you alone bared the burden of paying for, then Waze wouldn't use it.
This sig intentionally left blank.
In the short term, yeah, putting up obstacles and generally making it harder for traffic to come through the side streets will work.
But in the long term, that's only going to - at best - shift the load to other side streets. In order to fix this problem properly, you need to make the major roads more useful. That means either widening them (which may not be possible, if the area in question is built up - exactly as you'd expect in a large city), or reducing the demand for the roads. Reducing the demand means either encouraging people to car pool (which doesn't work that well; there's a reason people like private vehicles), or introducing alternatives... like large-scale public transport. Heavy rail is best: up to thirty thousand passengers per hour per direction (500 per minute - try getting that volume of traffic on the road!), but is also the most expensive. Light rail is up to about a third of that, but has a number of issues (like, for example, sharing the same roads that are ridiculously congested, in the simplest designs.)
Town planning is hard. Blaming these apps for these problems is simply blaming another symptom - they didn't create the problem, they're merely making it more obvious.
If people are driving properly, and obeying the speed limit, then your complaints are groundless. You can kvetch all you want, as that's your right? But unless you buy the street and make it private, then you have to accept it as part and parcel of living in a civilized society.
[End Of Line]
Sometimes traffic is not served by having too many routes to each destination. In areas where drivers are getting off of freeways and going onto side streets a lot, it might make sense to petition the town re-design the roads so that cut-through routes aren't possible. Local traffic might have longer drive times to previously connected locations, but overall improvement, due to having only local traffic on local roads.
However, if you've got months-long road construction projects that aren't bridges over navigable bodies of water, that's a problem that also needs to be solved. Road construction companies bid on a ton of projects and work on them in parallel, which is great for the construction crew as they have steady work, but shitty for all the commuters, compared to taking the same total time for all the projects, but one-after-another.
The bidding process needs to be adjusted to encourage companies to spend as little time as possible on each project. Perks like a crew being the automatic pothole filler and spot repairer for the section of road they're "working on" or letting them park their equipment "on site" (I presume rent-free?) for the duration of the project don't encourage projects to be individually short. Stuff shouldn't take months with no one on site for days at a time unless there is chemistry to wait on.
(Sorry, I don't have any mod points to share.)
In most "public" neighborhoods, streets are maintained with special assessments. When I bought my home a few years back, I took over payment of $5,000 in specials for a road repaving project that was done in the neighborhood. I'd be pissed as hell to see a bunch of crazed drivers tearing up the road that my neighborhood had to pay for.
Besides, our roads weren't engineered to handle thousands of vehicles a day, and our neighborhoods weren't engineered to help traffic navigate the parked cars, kids playing in the street, narrow turns, and unmarked intersections. I sure as hell wouldn't appreciate that kind of traffic next to my home and would organize whatever kind of neighborhood brigade possible to fight it.
Are you all fucking nuts?
Those roads do not belong to property owners, residents, or communities (unless hey are private and gated). They belong to the tax-paying public, the owners are those users driving down the road!
Those cars are getting better gas mileage not sitting in bumper to bumper traffic.
Those users can get home faster to their families, and so can you since you can drive through some other neighborhoods when traffic backs up.
The big roads will be a bit clearer if emergency personnel need to get through traffic to save a life.
If you want the "sanctity" of your own neighborhood, go buy property in a gated community with HOA fees, so you own a part of the street you and your fucking neighbors are demand exclusive rights to. Now get off my lawn!
Neither did the property owners.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Once it backs up from the other direction, and they can't back up either, it will create a lovely snarl that people will learn to avoid.
Apparently your suggestion to this "foreign" traffic causing congestion in your sainted neighborhoods is to create congestion in your neighborhoods.
Much safer congestion by the way. The problem with sending traffic in a hurry to avoid traffic congestion on the main highways onto local streets, is that the local streets are simply not designed for the traffic. A residential street has vehicles parked on both sides, and is almost always 25 miles per hour or even less. Not many peopple who are trying to avoid traffic eve drive that speed. It isn't safe for children playing in their yards - hey, a child chasing a ball onto the road should not be punisible by death.
We have had a little bit of trouble, not much. we just contact the local police, and people like yourself get hammered. You might consider some folks driving slowly at rush hours, and impeding your trip home to be the least of the problems you will have. We'll even know about you before you get here. We have the app as well.
You want to drive in my neighborhood, you are most welcome, it's a beautiful place. . But not as a pack of people speeding to get someplace else in hurry, on a road never designed for that traffic level.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The drivers are going through the neighborhood to route around construction. The root problem is that the construction is taking months to complete. Americans may be surprised, but in many other countries major road repairs are completed in days. I have lived in both China and Japan, where they set up giant illumination lights, and work around the clock in a bustle of activity until the project is done. In America, you just see idle equipment, and occasionally a couple guys in hard hats chatting while drinking coffee. America has the world's most expensive and dysfunctional processes for repairing infrastructure.
Irrespective. Construction or not, it's still a right-of-access issue. And the public have a right of access down a publicly funded road.
To be fair, I doubt these residential roads were built with such traffic in mind. Speed limits, intersections, shoulder/easement types, etc. are designed with a certain number of cars per hour in mind. I can see how it could be a safety issue, especially if children are involved (wanting to play outside, but now its a solid line of traffic and the parents don't want to risk their ball going into the road or something)
Those roads do not belong to property owners, residents, or communities (unless hey are private and gated). They belong to the tax-paying public, the owners are those users driving down the road!
Irrelevant -- it is a road with a specific intended purpose, and that purpose is not as a main thoroughfare. In the UK we call residential areas co-opted into mainstream use this way "rat runs", and they are a significant public safety problem. The turn-of-the-century approach to rat runs here was "traffic calming measures" (everything from blocking off one end of the road to speed bumps, cobblestones and choke-points where only one car can pass at a time, with priority given to cars leaving the area) and that was usually only required on fairly straight sections. The only real hazard that it let through was cavalier motorcycle couriers with an intimate local knowledge of backstreets (but even that wasn't much of a problem, as motorcyclists are allowed to "filter" through traffic jams anyway, so are happy to stay on major thoroughfares). Waze and similar speed-aware services now offer every user the knowledge of those motorcycle couriers, and direct people down roads that are not designed for that sort of traffic.
Your argument is "the roads belong to all of us, so we can do what we like with them", which seems fair enough. But you wouldn't accept that I can dig up a road and melt down the bitumen for resale. Why not? Because that's not what it's there for. The town hall may "belong" to me, but I can't just set up a woodworking studio in it, because that's not what it's there for..
Now simplistically a road is for "driving on", so this is a controversial case, but if you go to City Hall and check the documents, you'll be able to see what the road's intended usage was, and you'll see that "rat run" is not part of the planned spec.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Are you all fucking nuts?
Those cars are getting better gas mileage not sitting in bumper to bumper traffic... Those users can get home faster to their families, and so can you since you can drive through some other neighborhoods when traffic backs up... Now get off my lawn!
Those cars you mention are hitting pedestrians in my residential neighborhood with increasing frequency. Some of the pedestrians don't get home to their families. EMTs cannot get to them quickly because these side-roads, not intended for dual-lane or heavy traffic, become clotted with traffic when someone gets hit.
Go piss on your lawn.