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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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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
(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.
where in australia?
Salzburg.
quiet ( auto spellcheck)
No, an anti-scientific non-sequitor posted on a tech blog by an Anonymous Coward must be a troll.
Last post!
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.