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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."
The neighborhood associations need to hire someone to drive back and forward on the route at 2.5 mph during peek hours.
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.
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I am incredibly sympathetic to increased traffic in a residential area, in most cases the drivers should be weary of that.
But then I see Takoma Park as the location. I know this guy's pain. I'm surprised he's not experiencing worse. The "Maryland driver near DC" is why we can't have nice things.
Tell a cop and they'll set up several speed traps for distracted driving. That will make drivers think twice about using your street.
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.
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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.
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.
Try this: In the summary above, replace "weary homeowner" with "millionaire recluse" and also replace "Timothy Connor" with "Reginald Bottomtooth". Now tell me if you feel bad for this guy.
At least where I live the city will put speed bumps in as along as most of the people living on the street are OK with it and are willing to pay for them. It's not great for the house living right next to the speed bumps as they have to listen to cars slowing and accelerating.
There are other traffic calming measures such as making the streets narrower, - even if it's just at intersections. Sometimes you can get the city to post a lower speed limit.
I drive a number of days a week a route to get home where highway and residential streets are almost the same length of time, with less variability of time as traffic on the freeway is just one minor indecent away from an extra half hour delay.
So, I take lots of residential streets. I try not to go too fast, respecting the neighborhoods I go through, just enjoying the houses and the lack of cars in front of me.
But it's not like Waze is taking me on those routes. To the contrary, if I try to navigate home Waze is every so eager to whip me over to some major road or highway - even though the time estimate of when I might arrive never really varies much if I continue on neighborhood roads.
Instead the way I find out which way to take is, simply looking at the map and seeing which road goes through to where I'm trying to go.
So it's not like Waze is directing all of them, lots of people figure this out on their own especially with something like permeant construction - you look for the nearest through road and take it.
If they really do not like it, speed bumps would probably work to deter most of the drivers, I know it keeps me off some roads I might otherwise go down. But not all of them, there are some roads I drive on every day that have speed bumps, which I tolerate because there simply is no other way through the area...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
for the road to handle a certain amount of traffic. In theory if more traffic was expected more money would be spent. In practice we've been cutting infrastructure spending since Regan all in the name of eliminating waste and bureaucracy.
The private roads are just fine, it's the public ones that are screwed up.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Taxpayers are driving on taxpayer funded roads, this guy doesn't like it, and Waze is to blame?
What next? Blaming Amazon for the increase in UPS trucks in the neighborhood?
If you don't want other people driving on your street, buy a house on a cul de sac.
But a couple of junk cars and park them on opposite sides of the street in the middle of the block. That will cause traffic to come to a stop if there is anything above a normal amount of traffic.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
they post signs to bar non-local traffic during construction. A huge amount of extra traffic along roads not designed for it is dangerous. You'll get people driving too fast in places that are usually devoid of traffic (and therefore have lots of kids playing in the street). The correct solution to this is to build more high capacity roads, but after decades of hearing about all the money big gov't wastes nobody wants to talk about infrastructure spending...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I wonder if they've used the Waze Map Editor to make sure their street is not marked as a "Primary Street". Waze isn't supposed to route to Streets, only Primary Streets.
Better known as 318230.
It's really nice that some guy bought a house (or rents) and while his property ends at the property line, typically prior to the sidewalk if there is one, his sense of entitlement doesn't stop there, no it goes all the way to the other side of the street and then up and down the whole area.
Public streets are built by taxpayer-funded public funds and they are for EVERYONE's good. That includes the self-entitled guy who lives in that little house that posts false reports on Waze, and it includes EVERYONE else who wants to drive through that neighborhood.
I'm sure he'd be shocked if some people told him he couldn't drive on a particular segment of a particular freeway because they own a house nearby or something.
These people are not waze-warriors, they are malware-spreading(put in false info) misanthropic scumbags.
E
In my commute I know a good short cut. But it has three speed breakers. I value my brake pads, and fuel too. I take the long way around, may be half a mile longer, but easy on the brakes and easy on the gas.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
I can't see it from Australia
The problem is that Waze has a reason to exist. The problem is cities, counties and states that allow two day road repairs to take six months. If they'd make the construction crews do their job correctly, Waze would cease to exist within a few months, because the main thruways wouldn't be clogged up all the time and nobody would care.
It's called property taxes and living in a society. Everyone pays for maintaining "their" portion of street and sidewalk and in return you can use someone else's portion of street and sidewalk. How would I go about charging anyone that crosses my property line?
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I use Waze all the time and usually don't touch the screen while driving (sometimes I make an exception if there's something important to warn other drivers about). But that is optional, for most use I simply turn it on and watch for hazards on the map as I drive around.
If I'm navigating I start the navigation before I leave somewhere.
Although I don't use it, Waze also offers a voice control mode that is all microphone driven.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
WAZE is not the real culprit here... they are trying to solve a real problem with congestion due to inadequate infrastructure or "montths-long" road closures. So now the drivers have intelligent tools that clue them in to using your street as a way around the problem. But the real issue is the closed road, the inadequate capacity. Don't petition your city for more stop signs... get them to fix the damned main road.
https://www.viennava.gov/Docum...
(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.
Actually. Waze has a failure with private roads that are visible to satellite. I have sent in several corrections, some of which they persist in ignoring. Fortunately some of the ones they have ignored are blocked by a fixed gate. They still won't block (during school hours) the street that's closed during school hours behind a local elementary school (also blocked by a gate).
Here its a case of tooooo many red lights with no timing or ill timing. I'm always better off turning off down a side road to avoid a light(s) . Even if I get a few stop signs in exchange. Some of the roads are third world quality, especially in poorer areas. Pitiful considering we dont get many freezes. Regardless, if its not raining I can take a motorcycle and only need a few inches of decent road surface.
where in australia?
Salzburg.
I own a custom software development company, with a MS in CS, and a great deal of familiarity with graph theory. If anyone wants to build a Waze faker, send me a message. Faking GPS coordinates to look like motion won't be rough. I'd recommend starting on Android, and then moving to iOS.
Today's quite neighborhood is bound to become tomorrows busy suburb .
That's what the road is made for.
Be glad it were quiet for a long time and may be quiet again when other ways are usable instead of complaining.
The cure sounds worse than the disease.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The "too much traffic" complaint has been echoing in my neighborhood (not my immediate street, but the larger named "neighborhood").
It was never an issue until the city rebuilt a major arterial street with all kinds of "traffic calming" features, like curb extensions that prevent people from queuing for right turns in the "right"/parking lane, reducing the flow capacity of intersections by making right turns wait for through traffic at red lights and at many intersections, for left turning traffic as well.
They've also stripped a couple of large (3 lane) one-way streets with timed lights of an entire lane and converted it into a protected bike lane. This reduces capacity year-round even though with our harsh winters, only the most dedicated cyclists would bike November-March.
IMHO, the anti-car biases of the urban planners have created a lot of the local situation with their new "features", making the arterial roads so frustrating that people naturally seek alternatives. Traffic is like water -- you can reduce its flow in one place, but it will just flow elsewhere.
And I've been a longtime fan of the "back route" even before Waze (which I don't use). I've lived in the same city my whole life, so I have the advantage of decades of experience, but I do sometimes just put where I want to go as a destination and then just dive in to what I'm fairly sure will be a side route and then just ignore the directions until I actually need them, at which point it will route me through the side streets effectively.
I don't think there is a fix for the side road phenomenon other than making arterial streets have more traffic flow. Even though I live in the largest city in the state, the residential neighborhoods are heavily car dependent. They're too vast for effective walking anywhere -- shops and services can be a couple of miles, which is OK in good summer weather, but totally impractical for groceries or in any inclement weather.
About the only "fix" that would really help -- at least keep the locals out of their cars -- is a major overhaul of the zoning system to allow small shops and restaurants immediately in residential neighborhoods, but this would face huge opposition from immediate neighbors (although who wouldn't want a 25 seat pub a block and a half away) and probably economically non-viable due to regulations and low business volume.
No, an anti-scientific non-sequitor posted on a tech blog by an Anonymous Coward must be a troll.
Last post!
And one mindless idiot that click "Thanks/Like" so that the alert stays active almost forever. I've been clicking "Not there" on a alert for at least four months now. The award hungry Peters (that scream "wolf!") likes to stack their alerts to places where you have keep your attention to the road and not click on the phone.
I've used Waze in LA and NYC. Normally, it will only put you on local streets if the highway grid is fully locked up. I've crossed a few Queens neighborhoods, when the Cross Island is slammed and took some interesting canyon roads out west to avoid the 101. Back in the 80's I used to have a book called "no time for tie ups" which routed around most crux points in NYC. Waze does this dynamically. Luckily, I live on a dead end street !
I drive a number of days a week a route to get home where highway and residential streets are almost the same length of time, with less variability of time as traffic on the freeway is just one minor indecent away from an extra half hour delay.
So, I take lots of residential streets.
length of time is not the only criteria; side streets significantly increases your risk. In free-way if I'm absent minded and hit, it could be just a bumper. In side-street it could very well be a kid/pedestrian. So at times it's worth it just to sit in traffic in free-way than increase your exposure to unnecessary issues (legal?)
Until they cause a real accident as they are updating Waze while fucking driving.
Have you tried signing up to make the edits yourself? There may not be a strong supply of volunteer editors in your area, which results in map error reports getting ignored. But the beauty of Waze is that you can make the edits yourself or go to their forums and request edits by the volunteer community.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Actually, Waze is probably not to blame. Data on what is considered primary, secondary, and tertiary roads is given typically by the state department of transportation. While it's possible that there is an error in Waze due to an inaccurately coded street, it's just as likely that the original data was incorrect. At the OP suggested, just fix it and - even better - check with your DOT to see if they have the road identified incorrectly.
Interestingly, this whole debate started not because of safety or road maintenance worries but because people who thought they bought on a quiet street now find out that they live on a busier street and are annoyed at the traffic. They're willing to actively mess with day-to-day traffic to try and push the traffic onto someone else's street rather that take the (nominally) one time action of learning WHY the reroute is happening and work to fix it. Fixing it may mean going to your state representative and asking to raise your taxes so that proper road maintenance and expansion can be done on the primary streets to avoid exactly the situation they are in. I guarantee that nobody who is re-routed through a neighborhood to avoid an hours-long backup due to undersized primary roads or construction traffic is any happier having to change their travel. This reaction is a typical NIMBY reaction.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Waze has methods of dealing with this. It's called a private installation...
https://wiki.waze.com/wiki/Pri...
But we don't just go putting them anywhere arbitrarily. We rely on local governments and DOTs to tell us where to put them. How? By determining if it's a private road or if there are regulatory signs prohibiting through traffic.
So if the homeowners don't want traffic routed through their neighborhood they need to go to their local government and get that done. Then soon as that's legally accomplished, then us editors for Waze will take the steps to prevent through routing through the neighborhood.
Takoma Park, not Tamoka Park.
I may need to re-install Waze....
These subdivisions nowadays are a pain. I like the old grid streets that run in a straight line between major roads....
this would help reduce accidents and throughput of cars
It does not matter. The point remains — we have a network of public roads. If the Internet can, famously, "route around damage" why should other networks' attempts to do the same raise any controversy?
If some pipe between two ISPs went down, would there even be an argument on /. over whether it is Ok for folks to sabotage rerouting by publishing bogus routing data? Would the posts with suggestions on how to best do it achieve "+5 Interesting"? What's wrong with you, people?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The neighborhood is Takoma Park, not Tamoka.
sounds like the age old teenage girl whine: "you're RUINING MY LIFE!"
Have a Day!
I live in an older neighborhood with a brick street. Some sections don't have the best maintenance, and directly in front of my house are substantial uneven sections that nearly buckle.
People who race past my house will loudly smack their undercarriage on the street. I have found car parts from time to time.
Residential streets aren't designed for this kind of traffic. I wonder if you could get the city to pass an ordnance prohibiting the usage of "live" traffic routing apps on residential streets. The local residents would probably almost unanimously support this, so would probably be easy to pass.
Then, any time this happens, two cops show up. One blocks off the downstream end of the street, the other wanders up the line and starts writing tickets. Word would get out quickly.
aka assholes.
Officials? Really? Officer of the Waze, aka some douche who has some minion coders working in his galley-way, I mean cubicles, to make the world a worse place so he can afford a Ferrari. Give me a break.
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Before Waze: the main routes were jammed, but there were some useful shortcuts for people in the know.
After Waze: the main routes are jammed, and now the shortcuts are also jammed.
Nice job, geniuses!
(FYI, this was a perfectly predictable and obvious outcome).
Wait, wait.
SANCTITY of neighborhoods
Where have we heard this before?
Oh, right, David Duke!
No, people who advocate bringing down traffic levels aren't nuts and there is a genuine conflict of interest to resolve here.
From a transport planning point of view you have various types of roads: some types of road are planned and designed to provide high levels of service to road users whereas other roads (mainly in residential areas) can be designed (or even just designated) to provide residential areas with safe and bearable traffic conditions.
It's basically the local council's job to balance these interests. What a local council is allowed to do is e.g. to limit the capacity of certain roads (through e.g. road closures, bends, througpasses, speed humps, traffic lights, or whatever) to the extent that such roads become unattractive to non-local traffic.
Tax-paying non-local motorists have no greater "right" to pass through residential areas than tax-paying residents have to demand that roads in residential areas have traffic conditions appropriate for residential areas.
Imagine if using the alternate routes actually burned out the wires and destroyed routers when this occurred.
In this case, "routing around the damage" would be viewed differently.
Traffic routing onto inappropriate roads damages the roads and kills people (esp children and bicyclists).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Another clue: picking out a simple spelling mistake and ignoring the actual point, again as an AC. Well done.
Last post!
The article made no mention on whether the homeowner checked the Waze Map Editor [waze.com] to make sure his and the surrounding roads were marked correctly. For example, a road marked [waze.com] as a <a rel="nofollow" title="umbrellas" href="http://shadess.ucoz.net/">umbrellas</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.
[URL="http://shadess.ucoz.net"]http://shadess.ucoz.net[/URL]
I work in an old neighborhood. The surrounding area is residential. For years this neighborhood has endured road repairs as a result of gas, water, and sewer repairs. Most of the trunk lines run right down the main street where my company is located.
During road work the local police set up detours at either end of the work area. Naturally, since the surrounding community is residential, the traffic must flow into back roads and through residential neighborhoods.
Since the infrastructure her is well over 100 years old, these projects go on for months. Therefore the detours and traffic diversions persist for months.
The local police are diverting traffic the exact same way waze does. By your logic, the police are at fault for ruining the lives of the surrounding community.
No sane person should come to that conclusion.
What I see is a whiny guy who can't stand a little extra traffic on his street - caused by a TEMPORARY condition.
Blame waze all you want, but it looks like a bunch of overly entitled people looking for someone or something to blame.
Nothing happens to the "alternative" wires, that does not happen to the normally-used ones.
Bzzz! Hold it right there! What makes them "inappropriate"? Are some public roads more public than others?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
1) That's my point. Using residential streets for highway traffic destroys them which will require higher and sooner maintenance.
Residential streets are 3.5" of asphalt over 6" of aggregate.
Highways are 11" of cement over 21" packed base of aggregate.
2) Yes, absolutely. Some roads are more public than others.If you google "traffic calming" you'll find that even cities as small 100,000 in many countries employ traffic calming measures such as speed bumps, gates, street closures, raised intersections to dissuade inappropriate traffic. Residential streets are intended to receive a low level of traffic going to and from the residences at low speeds. When people are civil, municipalities do not need to use traffic calming measures. When civility breaks down, municipalities deploy traffic calming measures fairly quickly.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This whole thing is ridiculous.... the guy could have logged into the waze map editor and down graded the roads. Sheesh.
There are actually city laws that restrict through traffic in neighborhoods in many cities. Is Waze obeying these laws? If not, file a suit against them. Sending a driver into a neighborhood with a no through traffic law is just as against the law as suggesting a driver go down a one-way street.
If you don't have such a law, and your government allows lobbying, then go to your city meetings/counsels and lobby for the law. If the law doesn't pass. Deal with it. If the law passes, then once the law is in place, contact Waze. If Waze stops. Great. If Waze doesn't stop routing traffic through the neighborhood, but continues to send drivers intended to be through traffic, file a lawsuit. The fact that you contacted them, asked them to obey the law and they didn't is not going to go well for them in court.
My guess is that they are going to hit a lawsuit soon. And it is going to be a class action suit with thousands of neighborhoods joining in, so it will become a big deal.
I can sympathize with those residents. A little extra traffic is temporarily tolerable. Yet, heavy traffic is not reasonable. The Community needs to take action like gating the community, or having traffic-limiting signs. I have seen this in places: "Local traffic only", or "Do Not Enter (btwn 7-9am and 4-7pm)". Folks choose a residence for some peace and quiet. That needs to be respected.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Construction companies never have detours. Radio stations never tell people about problems.
Just because they were looking down doesn't mean waze. Could be they were texting or doing something else. Who knows.
I use waze every day. I seldom have to actually look at it, especially in traffic. I just glance for police usually. Waze will verbally tell me of changes.
File this one in the id-ten-t folder.