You’d get laughed at in the US for making such a request. If it does happen, I’d bet you the decision would be reversed within 5 years by the same residents.
I’m not at all sure that this ‘subversion’ on the part of local spoiled residents of upscale LA neighborhoods (apologies for the redundancy) will have any effect on Waze’s ability to accurately report the traffic conditions. From my use of Waze, I believe that in addition to factoring specific reports/notifications from users, it also uses the basic data that is the speed of every incoming signal from every current active Waze user.
That is, I believe the Waze system actually factors the speed at which each phone that’s using the app is moving, along with its past and current location. So Waze knows how fast each car in its network is moving and can use that data in aggregate to confirm the accuracy/veracity of the traffic reports that individual Wazers are submitting.
1 Like
Even in wealthy areas?
I only mentioned it because it’s exactly what happened in my parents’ village (in the UK). The main road through the village was bypassed, so the residential streets on the edges of the village became de facto access routes to the bypass.
One wealthier street had itself blocked in two places to force traffic off it, and when a new estate was built in the area it was deliberately built as two dead-end estates rather than providing another link road to the bypass, to increase house prices.
My parents’ street got a couple of speed bumps, but because they didn’t build the access route when they should have, it still gets all the traffic because there is no better option.
If the problem is that extreme, have you tried writing the city? There are more extreme tactics such as diverters. Of course, there are also disadvantages to this, since a lot of traffic calming devices make it more difficult for emergency vehicles to have quick response times.
For a real city example, try reading Berkeley’s traffic calming history.
1 Like
Yeah, I live on a short side-street, and people use it as a “short cut” all the time - and usually while doing so they grossly exceed the speed limit (which isn’t any different from the surrounding streets, either, so they don’t even have that excuse). Given how short the street is and the nature of the surrounding intersections, they gain (at most) a second or two, even when traveling at dangerous speeds in a residential area.
If you can drive 45 over speed humps in your neighborhood, your traffic department isn’t doing it right. That would blow your suspension out if you did it in my neighborhood.
2 Likes
One thing you learn in public transportation: Congestion Kills. Literally.
Once traffic starts to back up onto freeway on-ramps and spills into the preceding intersections, people die. I’m not a fan of Waze as it focuses too much of the drivers’ attention on its game-like interface, but it may be saving as many lives as it is endangering.
1 Like
If speed is a factor, it seems to me that the city could make a tidy profit with a little traffic enforcement.
And weren’t there a number of articles a while ago about annoying suburbs where it was impossible to get directly from point A to point B? At least with blocking off existing roads, pedestrians and bicyclists are not inconvenienced. Yeah, this is where road diets and traffic calming can go a long way.
3 Likes
culs-de-sac
5 Likes
They are essentially creating a virtual speed hump by doing this in Waze. Isn’t this a much more cost effective method?
Does Waze take into account Braess’s paradox?
2 Likes
I’m reminded of my favorite letter from VIZ magazine:
"Dear Sirs,
Speed humps, my eye! Why, if anything, they slow you down!"
5 Likes
This kind of thinking is the problem, because not all roads are designed for all levels of traffic.
A freeway is intended for high volumes of traffic at high speed. Residential connecter roads are not. The impact that X amount of traffic has on a freeway is insignificant compared to the impact the same amount will have on a small road not intended for that level of usage.
Just because a road is “public” doesn’t mean people should be misusing it.
3 Likes
Reminds me of driving to visit a friend in New Jersey decades ago, before GPS & apps. Driving along the Jersey turnpike, I couldn’t find the exit. I drove back and forth several times, saw signs for the exits on either side of town, and finally tried the unmarked road in between the two marked exits. Bingo!
Turned out that the town residents didn’t like semi-trailers driving through their downtown, so they had the state remove the turnpike exit sign to hide the town. Of course all the truck drivers were familiar with the area and knew exactly where to go, it only messed up people new to the area.
The fact that several big-time organized crime families happened to live in that town probably made it easier for them to get a project like sign removal approved by the DPW.
2 Likes
Except congestion on freeways only occurs when people get off at an exit.
If this app is dumping people into residential sections, that means an increase in the frequency and number of people exiting the freeway, particularly at points where the smaller roadways aren’t equipped to handle all the traffic, which results in a greater chance of backups onto the ramps. Odds are good this is actually making matters worse and backups more likely by diverting traffic onto roads that can’t handle it all.
“Dang it! Twenty minutes on the freeway and a measly two miles before I was gonna get off at the Major Thoroughfare Road exit, wouldn’t ya know it, there’s a giant traffic jam at Podunk Road exit!”
1 Like
my street is a dead-end but google maps and mapquest show it connecting to a major street and it would represent a nice shortcut from one part of town to another if it actually connected them. i see a lot of cars go flying by and then stop, sit for a minute, and then turn around and drive angrily out four or five times an afternoon. a dozen or so on saturdays.
1 Like
I wonder if I’m just being a layman drawing parallels between things he knows too little about, or whether making ‘crowdsourcing’ work actually has substantial parallels to some of the strategies we see among biological systems for communication and dealing with potentially deceptive signalling?
Absolutely. Claiming your street is congested when it isn’t in order to send “competitors” away is actually a lot like how some male birds make false predator alarm calls to scare off their competitors.
4 Likes
It sounds like the real problem is that L.A. is neither fish nor fowl: neither a traditional city nor a series of suburbs stretched out on either side of a highway.
In a city, you have a network of major streets with retail and commercial buildings, so any time spent on an all-residential side street is relatively short, only at the beginning or ending of your trip.
In more conventional suburbs, the areas at each exit are not full-on residential yet. Again, you’d be going through commercial, residential, even municipal areas on major roads, not winding through residential areas. Even frontage roads are relatively traffic-friendly.
L.A. is more a conglomeration, a Gordian knot of municipalities.
2 Likes
I used to live near a block where the side street had a “no exit” sign on one end and a “one way” (out) sign on the other. It was near a popular beach in New Jersey, which often had more cars going there than parking spaces on a good weekend, so parking would overflow into the neighborhoods a mile away, making it impossible for people to get out of their driveways.
Much of Berkeley is broken up into residential streets and traffic streets, with barriers at the intersections in the residential areas that either force you to turn, or at least force you to slow down and go around them. This creates an obvious political issue, because everybody would like the block they live on to have a barrier slowing down traffic, but would like the blocks they drive on not to do that.
1 Like
Well fine but working that way you are going to have car congestion everywhere. I commute by bicycle and train, taking advantage of road systems which have been engineered to minimise through traffic by motor vehicles. My city gets more use out of its infrastructure that way.
5 Likes
