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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
(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.
That seems like a lot of work. The city I lived in just put up signs closing those streets to anyone except residents during rush hour, and passed a law allowing police to ticket people attempting to cut through those streets. Every rush hour, there'd be at least one police car who'd follow one random car turning into the residential street, to see if they went to a house or if they were using it to bypass traffic.