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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."
The solution is really simple. Mark the street as "No Thru Traffic" since that's essentially what he wants. Waze and others will update their maps accordingly. In OpenStreetMap it's just a matter of adding an "access=destination" attribute and I'm sure Waze, Google, Apple and others have similarly simple ways of representing this. They will then stop routing people through that street. The city does no even need to enforce the street sign since all they want to avoid is the excess traffic driven by the apps. Problem solved.
But only the city (or maybe some county/state department) has the authority to make that decision so he should work on it instead of making an ass of himself and wasting everyone else's time.
... if you don't like people driving on a public road, then... well, it's a public road.
By definition, the public can go on a public road.
Are people speeding? Give them tickets.
Are people not stopping at lights/stop signs? Give them tickets.
Otherwise STFU.
It always bugs me when Waze routes me through residential streets. I wish there were a setting to stick to thoroughfares.
Its because the traffic planning is so bad that they use these apps. I know quite a few bottle necks that if they fixed in LA would clean up a lot of traffic.
Or add "NO THROUGH TRAFFIC" signs on the roads that they desire no through traffic to be on. This is exactly why signage and traffic laws exist.
Everything that Waze is doing is legal. There just isn't any room for argument from municipalities as there might be with AirBNB and Uber.
Still, those roads were funded by the public, which includes federal dollars, state dollars, county dollars, and special taxes on fuel. They weren't funded by the council or this ass-hat. He doesn't get to tell the public they can't use the roads they funded, and he doesn't get to tell Waze (or google) they can't help those who want to use them coordinate.
LA has a traffic problem, and to help distribute the load, Waze has come up with a pretty ingenious idea. Where was the councilman then? Not giving a rats ass about anyone or anything except his little district.
Always trying to legislate or litigate away people's freedom, these ass hats.
No, the whole discussion is about an app routing via the faster route (because the main route is congested). Not the couple of people who decide to drive that way on their own.
The app doesn't need a police officer to enforce the routing, it just needs to be marked as "no through":
The whole discussion appears to be that Waze believes they are in the business of distributing information about roads, not in the business of lying about roads, so if the city doesn't want the app to route people via that road, they need to put up the signs.