LA Councilman Asks City Attorney To 'Review Possible Legal Action' Against Waze (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Yet another Los Angeles city councilman has taken Waze to task for creating "dangerous conditions" in his district, and the politician is now "asking the City to review possible legal action." "Waze has upended our City's traffic plans, residential neighborhoods, and public safety for far too long," LA City Councilman David Ryu said in a statement released Wednesday. "Their responses have been inadequate and their solutions, non-existent. They say the crises of congestion they cause is the price for innovation -- I say that's a false choice." In a new letter sent to the City Attorney's Office, Ryu formally asked Los Angeles' top attorney to examine Waze's behavior. While Ryu said he supported "advances in technology," he decried Waze and its parent company, Google, for refusing "any responsibility for the traffic problems their app creates or the concerns of residents and City officials."

Comments

Re: Mark the street as "No Thru Traffic"

[Anonymous Coward]

Our city has signed my street with âoethrough traffic prohibitedâ and sent a letter to Waze of the change. Nothing has happened. Phone staring zombies still speeding through the neighborhood. Los Altos Hills has had some success but then Alphabet big wigs live there.

Re:Mark the street as "No Thru Traffic"

[AmiMoJo]

Problem is if everyone acts selfishly it just makes the traffic worse all round. Yes, it might take you an extra 5 minutes to do the long way around that the city wants you to take, but if everyone takes the shortcut it ends up taking everyone 30 minutes more. There can be down-stream issues too, like excessive numbers of people trying to merge back onto the main route causing that to slow down too, excessive wear on local roads that are not able to handle the load, disruption to other local road users etc.

It's the classic tragedy of the commons that government is supposed to solve.

In this case there is a safety issue too. The road in question is extremely steep and a lot of vehicles have trouble with it, either lacking the power to go up at a reasonable speed or struggling to resist gravity on the way down.