Weary Homeowners Wage War On Waze 767
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."
Slow them with real traffic (Score:5, Interesting)
The neighborhood associations need to hire someone to drive back and forward on the route at 2.5 mph during peek hours.
Re:Slow them with real traffic (Score:5, Funny)
The neighborhood associations need to hire someone to drive back and forward on the route at 2.5 mph during peek hours.
But what about the poke hours?
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You've peaked my interest with your comment.
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-----> The Joke You -----
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Way to poke fun at me.
Re:Slow them with real traffic (Score:4, Funny)
Damn Sprites peeking and poking each other
Stop using BASIC!
Assign to and from unsigned char * like a proper programmer.
Re:Slow them with real traffic (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks for explaining the joke, Admiral Aspergers. *golf clap*
Re:Slow them with real traffic (Score:5, Interesting)
You joke but the bedroom community I used to live in does in fact hire "traffic calmers" to essentially drive around during the rush hours 7a-10a, 11:30a-1:30a, 4:30p-6p along the main roots at exactly the speed limit (or slightly less).
You could always spot them because they were older obviously retirees who could have and would have reasonably avoided going out at those times otherwise.
I can't say I am in favor of it, but I can say a few things for it.
1) It did not cost the city much. They paid basically minimum wage + the federal mileage rate. Much cheaper than paying police officers overtime to do more traffic enforcement or hiring more officers.
2) It probably did improve safety and reduce noise somewhat
3) As irritating as sitting behind someone doing exactly 25MPH might be, its less irritating than a traffic citation.
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You joke but the bedroom community I used to live in does in fact hire "traffic calmers" to essentially drive around during the rush hours 7a-10a, 11:30a-1:30a, 4:30p-6p along the main roots at exactly the speed limit (or slightly less).
Did that include the branches and the trunk routes as well?
Brick Street (Score:3)
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.
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The neighborhood associations need to hire someone to drive back and forward on the route at 2.5 mph during peek hours.
Have everyone on the block park as far off the curb in the street as is legal to slow down the traffic.
Or just find out where Julie Mossler lives and report faster traffic through her neighborhood.
Re: Slow them with real traffic (Score:5, Insightful)
Those roads do not belong to property owners, residents, or communities (unless hey are private and gated). They belong to the tax-paying public, the owners are those users driving down the road!
Those cars are getting better gas mileage not sitting in bumper to bumper traffic.
Those users can get home faster to their families, and so can you since you can drive through some other neighborhoods when traffic backs up.
The big roads will be a bit clearer if emergency personnel need to get through traffic to save a life.
If you want the "sanctity" of your own neighborhood, go buy property in a gated community with HOA fees, so you own a part of the street you and your fucking neighbors are demand exclusive rights to. Now get off my lawn!
Re: Slow them with real traffic (Score:5, Insightful)
The drivers are going through the neighborhood to route around construction. The root problem is that the construction is taking months to complete. Americans may be surprised, but in many other countries major road repairs are completed in days. I have lived in both China and Japan, where they set up giant illumination lights, and work around the clock in a bustle of activity until the project is done. In America, you just see idle equipment, and occasionally a couple guys in hard hats chatting while drinking coffee. America has the world's most expensive and dysfunctional processes for repairing infrastructure.
Re: Slow them with real traffic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Slow them with real traffic (Score:5, Interesting)
I have lived in both China and Japan, where they set up giant illumination lights, and work around the clock in a bustle of activity until the project is done.
In and around DC road construction is done just as you describe. We also have a mobile factory that can pave a lane of the highway at about 10 miles per hour. It's actually pretty impressive.
Re: Slow them with real traffic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Slow them with real traffic (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Slow them with real traffic (Score:5, Insightful)
Those roads do not belong to property owners, residents, or communities (unless hey are private and gated). They belong to the tax-paying public, the owners are those users driving down the road!
Irrelevant -- it is a road with a specific intended purpose, and that purpose is not as a main thoroughfare. In the UK we call residential areas co-opted into mainstream use this way "rat runs", and they are a significant public safety problem. The turn-of-the-century approach to rat runs here was "traffic calming measures" (everything from blocking off one end of the road to speed bumps, cobblestones and choke-points where only one car can pass at a time, with priority given to cars leaving the area) and that was usually only required on fairly straight sections. The only real hazard that it let through was cavalier motorcycle couriers with an intimate local knowledge of backstreets (but even that wasn't much of a problem, as motorcyclists are allowed to "filter" through traffic jams anyway, so are happy to stay on major thoroughfares). Waze and similar speed-aware services now offer every user the knowledge of those motorcycle couriers, and direct people down roads that are not designed for that sort of traffic.
Your argument is "the roads belong to all of us, so we can do what we like with them", which seems fair enough. But you wouldn't accept that I can dig up a road and melt down the bitumen for resale. Why not? Because that's not what it's there for. The town hall may "belong" to me, but I can't just set up a woodworking studio in it, because that's not what it's there for..
Now simplistically a road is for "driving on", so this is a controversial case, but if you go to City Hall and check the documents, you'll be able to see what the road's intended usage was, and you'll see that "rat run" is not part of the planned spec.
Re: Slow them with real traffic (Score:5, Interesting)
In theory, the roads to belong to all of us. However depending on your municipality, how the funds for road maintenance are distributed often coincide with how much tax the residents on that road pay.
When you take a quiet residential street and suddenly increase the volume 100 fold, do you think they are going to take away highway maintenance funds to repair that, especially when it was not meant to be a detour around construction?
I feel the residents have a very legitimate reason to be upset. Now, who they should be upset with is more easily debated. Patience in our society is gone, everyone looking for a shortcut.
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It is not the UK, no, but unless US law mandates that all public roads are constructed at highway grade, the same underlying principles should apply. I understand this a temporary situation due to ongoing works, but I suspect that in the US you have the same concept of "diversion" as here -- an official alternative route to get you where you wanted to go. Much of these alternative routes are planned in advance, and roads are specifically built to withstand the extra load of functioning as a diverted route.
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It's not as simple as that...
By increasing congestion on the minor roads, now others (ie those who need to use those minor roads) will take longer to get anywhere and their cars will get worse mileage.
Taking a minor road to avoid congestion elsewhere only works if not many people are doing it, once you get a significant number of cars on a minor road it will become even more congested than the highway. Highways are designed to carry large numbers of cars, residential streets are not.
Re: Slow them with real traffic (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you all fucking nuts?
Those cars are getting better gas mileage not sitting in bumper to bumper traffic... Those users can get home faster to their families, and so can you since you can drive through some other neighborhoods when traffic backs up... Now get off my lawn!
Those cars you mention are hitting pedestrians in my residential neighborhood with increasing frequency. Some of the pedestrians don't get home to their families. EMTs cannot get to them quickly because these side-roads, not intended for dual-lane or heavy traffic, become clotted with traffic when someone gets hit.
Go piss on your lawn.
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> Those cars you mention are hitting pedestrians in my residential neighborhood with increasing frequency
So what you're saying is you have shitty drivers in your city who shouldn't be on the roads at all. Sounds like a bigger problem that needs addressing than just making sure they don't run over *your* neighbors.
Re: Slow them with real traffic (Score:3)
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Hire peeping toms?
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The neighborhood associations need to hire someone to drive back and forward on the route at 2.5 mph during peek hours.
Except that many places have laws about "obstructing traffic."
If it's really heavy traffic, what they really need to do is get residents to legally park along both sides of the street during rush hour, so there's only room for one lane of traffic between them. Then several others drive down the street opposing the flow of traffic, get to the bottleneck, and simply refuse to back up (there's really no clear right-of-way), with other residents coming in behind them. Once it backs up from the other direction,
Re:Slow them with real traffic (Score:4, Insightful)
Once it backs up from the other direction, and they can't back up either, it will create a lovely snarl that people will learn to avoid.
Apparently your suggestion to this "foreign" traffic causing congestion in your sainted neighborhoods is to create congestion in your neighborhoods.
Much safer congestion by the way. The problem with sending traffic in a hurry to avoid traffic congestion on the main highways onto local streets, is that the local streets are simply not designed for the traffic. A residential street has vehicles parked on both sides, and is almost always 25 miles per hour or even less. Not many peopple who are trying to avoid traffic eve drive that speed. It isn't safe for children playing in their yards - hey, a child chasing a ball onto the road should not be punisible by death.
We have had a little bit of trouble, not much. we just contact the local police, and people like yourself get hammered. You might consider some folks driving slowly at rush hours, and impeding your trip home to be the least of the problems you will have. We'll even know about you before you get here. We have the app as well.
You want to drive in my neighborhood, you are most welcome, it's a beautiful place. . But not as a pack of people speeding to get someplace else in hurry, on a road never designed for that traffic level.
Re:Slow them with real traffic (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why they need to put back in the roadside trees, the ones they remove with great enthusiasm [dot.gov] because motorists keep hitting them. Roadside trees give motorists a greater sense of speed so they will drive more slowly.
These neighborhoods only need to convince [youtube.com] their local traffic "engineers" (I use this word in the most optimistic sense possible) that a few airbag-equipped cars hitting trees is a much better outcome than neighborhood children getting mowed down.
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Just park trucks on the incoming ends of the streets in question combined with some road work signs.
The main problem though is the lack of alternate routes for traffic.
Re:Slow them with real traffic (Score:4, Insightful)
Neither did the property owners.
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Great. Your solution really is to create a shitty stupid fucked up junction.
Four way stop signs are just fucking idiotic. There are pretty much no circumstances in which they're an optimal solution.
That's just too damn bad. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: That's just too damn bad. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually you didnt. Im my neighborhood, the homeowners were assessed for the cost of the street via fees paid by the contractor passed on to the buyer.
So fuck off, dick.
Mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)
(Sorry, I don't have any mod points to share.)
In most "public" neighborhoods, streets are maintained with special assessments [wikipedia.org]. 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.
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And, in exchange for excluding "outsiders" who didn't pay a special assessment for your street maintenance, you will agree to stay off all streets which others, but not you, have paid a special assessment for the maintenance of?
Probably a pretty good trade off for all of us because you likely be unable to go much of anywhere and that will reduce congestion for the rest of us.
(It will be a damned shame when the homeowners a couple blocks over refuse to let the fire trucks through to your house because the fi
Re:Mod parent up (Score:4, Interesting)
"Besides, our roads weren't engineered to handle thousands of vehicles a day..."
I wonder how you know these things? These aren't even your roads at all, they are city property.
I'm confident the roads you talk about weren't "engineered" to handle traffic in any way, they were simply built to accommodate the developers plans and to meet city codes.
And then there's the "kids playing in the street" excuse. Keep the kids out of traffic. Streets aren't a playground for children, they are for cars driving places.
If you don't want public access to local streets, you should live somewhere where local roads are privately owned and you should pay extra for the privilege. As is, all you demonstrate is entitlement.
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Looking at it another way, the neighborhood is seeing more traffic only because a larger road is temporarily under repair. Without that road, they'd be seeing
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Re:That's just too damn bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even ignoring safety, the paving of the side roads is not intended for heavy use and will quickly lead to potholes and more money being spent on repairs.
A big problem is that there's not a lot of traffic enforcement so the speed limits are ignored by the outsiders and a once safe neighborhood becomes dangerous.
We paid enough taxes (Score:3)
The private roads are just fine, it's the public ones that are screwed up.
Re:We paid enough taxes (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:We paid enough taxes (Score:5, Interesting)
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it dont have to be an a collision just a stalled car out of gas or breakdown or flat tire, just buy some cheap junk car for a few hundred and break down at the right time & place, i would hate to see my quiet street flooded with hundreds of cars per hour too
1) People who complain about this are probably the sort of people who enforce neighborhood covenants - that car wouldn't be allowed.
2) A broken down car on a public road will get towed within 24 hours, in all likelihood.
Re:That's just too damn bad. (Score:5, Informative)
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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> ... petition their local government to add stop signs at every intersection ..
Agreed. That or speed bumps every block. That will frustrate the majority of drivers and indirectly force the problem elsewhere.
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It will also frustrate the drivers who live on the street. Speed bumps probably cause more suspension damage than all the other problems with our road system put together, not to mention being annoying. I'm firmly of the opinion that they should be banned nationwide.
Re:That's just too damn bad. (Score:5, Interesting)
It will also frustrate the drivers who live on the street. Speed bumps probably cause more suspension damage than all the other problems with our road system put together, not to mention being annoying. I'm firmly of the opinion that they should be banned nationwide.
Here's a clue:
Don't go too fast and your suspension will be fine.
Damaged your suspension? Well, you went too fast. Now excuse me while I go and play the world's tiniest violin.
As a pedestrian I find douchebag entitled drivers going too fast far more annoying than I find speed bumps as a driver. Perhaps that's because I don't believe I ought to be able to hammer it down whatever streets I like regardledss of how appropriate.
Oddly enough, I never damaged any suspension on a road hump.
Re:That's just too damn bad. (Score:4, Insightful)
If going the speed limit results in damage to a vehicle's suspension, the speed limit is too high, or the road surface does not meet requirements.
No: the speed limit is the maximum allowed speed above which you can be prosecuted simply for exceeding the speed and nothing else. It says *nothing* about what the maximum safe speed is. There are many, many things which limit the safe speed to below the speed limit. It is a very fundamental misunderstanding of road safety to assume that the speed limit is a safe speed.
Here's an example where the speed limit is 60mph:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
However if you actually went at the speed limit, you'd be borderline suicidal and could probably be arrested for dangerous driving.
Other examples of things lowering the safe speed to well below the speed limit are fog, obstructions, other vehicles ahead of you going below the speed limit, reduced visibility due to weather or visual obstructions, poor road surface (e.g. pot holes), road works, snow, ice, mud, water and of course traffic calming measures.
You simply do not have a right to travel at the speed limit regardless of conditions. You absolutely have no right to exceed it. You only have a right to meet it IF you are driving safely.
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Agreed. That or speed bumps every block. That will frustrate the majority of drivers and indirectly force the problem elsewhere.
In our corner of the world, it's possible to have traffic signs installed that indicate ‘Closed for traffic’ and then add exceptions, such as for the local residents, public transportation, and service vehicles. That should pretty much do the trick, as far as Waze is concerned. As long as the road has been paid for by the local government, they *should* have a say in who gets to use this or that road and for what purpose. Streets in residential areas should not be used as thoroughfares, they hav
Re:That's just too damn bad. (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks for demonstrating why our rights under the Constitution need to be vigorously defended. We don't need wannabe-Diane Feinsteins like you running around taking them all away.
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The second amendment specifically states the right to bear arms is for use in a militia.
No it doesn't, it uses the necessity of a militia as a reason justify why the people (not "the militia") have the right to bear arms. Take the following hypothetical statement:
"Proper sanitation, being necessary to the preparation of healthy food, the right of the people to wash their hands, shall not be infringed."
Would you interpret that statement to say that only people who prepare food are allowed to wash their hands?
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And since the internet and phones and motorized printing presses didn't exist in 1791, the government can obviously ban any speech the desire via those mediums.
See where that logic gets you?
One purpose of the Second Amendment was to allow the people to defend themselves from the government. In the 1790's, the government and ordinary citizens had pretty much equal access to arms. To protect all the rights the Second Amendment was meant to protect, the people's right to keep and bear arms that are equivalent
Re:That's just too damn bad. (Score:4, Insightful)
Every issue, doesn't matter what the issue is, someone like you has to come in with your two dimensional black and white point of view and poisonous attitude. Yes, in simplest terms you are correct, if the road is paid for by the taxpayers then all taxpayers have a right to drive on it. HOWEVER, and this is where your myopic view refuses to go further, there is a big fucking difference between normal road use, heavy road use and peak level traffic which has been re-routed from a main fucking road down a quiet residential street which was never meant to handle it.
Aside from wrecking peoples quality of life there are safety concerns with children, not to mention emergency vehicle access down much narrower side streets.
So, no, try and be a little more understanding and intelligent before slapping your crap onto something you don't understand.
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Just because its a public road doesn't mean it was designed with heavy traffic flow in mind. So, no, you aren't as entitled as you think you are just becaus a fraction of a cent of your tax money might have gone to building some neighborhood's road.
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If someone uses your road continuously for several years they have very good grounds for an easement. You should protect yourself by posting signs stating permission to pass is revocable.
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If you're not a government representative, and your signs are not grounded in law, you should do time for interfering with traffic.
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Yeah, I lived in one of those for a while. The corporation buys it for dimes on the dollar from the city, you get to pay full price for it but when it comes to actually fixing anything, they tell you to call the city to come and fix it.
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And at that point the city should tell you to go fuck yourself. Taxpayers don't own it? Taxpayers shouldn't be paying to fix it.
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It's not illegal everywhere. Hands free is typically ok.
Yes, you can (Score:2)
I use Waze all the time and usually don't touch the screen while driving (sometimes I make an exception if there's something important to warn other drivers about). But that is optional, for most use I simply turn it on and watch for hazards on the map as I drive around.
If I'm navigating I start the navigation before I leave somewhere.
Although I don't use it, Waze also offers a voice control mode that is all microphone driven.
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OK there, Seven Digit ID.
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That almost hurt to read.
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Autonomous cars could potentially navigate with waze. A driver can be a jerk. Can a car be a jerk? I guarantee an uproar when cars are driving themselves through neighborhoods.
Re:That's just too damn bad. (Score:4, Insightful)
Then they can be gated and wouldn't show up on government databases which GPS manufacturers use. More often, these roads, utilities, right of ways and even entire neighborhoods are paid for by tax payers and later annexed by private home owner associations. We have plenty of those around here, the government gives great incentives on properties, taxes, supplies utilities, roads and police. If you want a fully private consortium to maintain your area, then pay for the damn utilities and security yourself.
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Neither were the arterial roads. I live in the suburbs of Atlanta and I cut through neighborhoods to avoid the jam packed arterial streets. I don't do it because I want to, but because idiot developers created a huge development around a small lake with no through streets. The city then let them do it without requiring the upgrading of the arterial streets that go around it. So why would I take a 2 lane arterial street with a 35mph speed limit where traffic is bumper to bumper averaging less than 5mph? I wo
Cause and Effect (Score:2)
I am incredibly sympathetic to increased traffic in a residential area, in most cases the drivers should be weary of that.
But then I see Takoma Park as the location. I know this guy's pain. I'm surprised he's not experiencing worse. The "Maryland driver near DC" is why we can't have nice things.
Waitaminit! (Score:3)
Long term solutions aren't easy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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There are other, much less radical solutions that would help a great deal. For example, Texas Turnarounds (eliminating all left turns and most traffic lights) would make major roads a lot more useful.
Sorry, Not Sorry (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
In my neck of the woods (Score:2)
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If even 20% of cars going through the streets near my place did that, I'd probably be able to sleep an extra hour in the morning. Obeying the speed limits? Lol.
Barriers to entry (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Needs municipal class action (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Worse yet are those bastards that publish maps. Rand-McNally for instance needs to be sued out of existance.
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+1 insightful (too bad I already commented) but this is spot on. When Waze pays the road maintenance taxes then they can bitch.
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Waze is given the destination address before I start driving. Listening to it's direction, as with any GPS device, is not using my cell phone while driving. Please stop trying to re-define what we are doing to fit your rant.
Break up the roads (Score:2, Insightful)
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 nav
Speed Bumps or other traffic calming measures. (Score:2)
There are other traffic calming measures such as making the streets narrower, - even if it's just at intersections. Sometimes you can get the city to post a lower speed limit.
You can't fool the real driver, never mind the app (Score:3)
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...
Comment removed (Score:3)
Simple solution (Score:2)
But a couple of junk cars and park them on opposite sides of the street in the middle of the block. That will cause traffic to come to a stop if there is anything above a normal amount of traffic.
Re: (Score:2)
And you'll be responsible for their tow and get a fine for having a car without plates or registration parked in the road. Nice try.
Map Editor (Score:2)
I wonder if they've used the Waze Map Editor to make sure their street is not marked as a "Primary Street". Waze isn't supposed to route to Streets, only Primary Streets.
Re: (Score:2)
I did a map search for "Elm Avenue, Takoma Park, Maryland", expecting to see something other than the narrow, obviously residential street it is. If hundreds of cars are being detoured there by Waze, that needs to be corrected. But I'm still leery of drawing conclusions based on anecdote; and the reporter seems to be just taking the guys word for it. I'm wondering if it's just an extra car or two a minute, in which case that shouldn't be problematic except when you're trying to play basketball in the street
PUBLIC STREETS belong to the public (Score:2)
It's really nice that some guy bought a house (or rents) and while his property ends at the property line, typically prior to the sidewalk if there is one, his sense of entitlement doesn't stop there, no it goes all the way to the other side of the street and then up and down the whole area.
Public streets are built by taxpayer-funded public funds and they are for EVERYONE's good. That includes the self-entitled guy who lives in that little house that posts false reports on Waze, and it includes EVERYONE el
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
There's also long studies made to make sure the streets are safe with the given expected traffic, choke points, traffic, and the fire department has to check it out to make sure it's okay in case of an emergency. It's not an exact science, but shit like this can seriously fuck things up.
Add that a lot of buildings and roads are built on pure corruption (things that really should not have been built gets built on "special" permits that skip normal rules, etc), and you end up with no one being happy.
Then you
Re: (Score:2)
Property lines typically include the sidewalk and sometimes portions of the street - basically up until the main sewage line for me (the city doesn't want to be responsible for 'my' portion of the sewage line).
Get some stop signs, speed breakers. (Score:3)
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.
Edit The Map (Score:5, Informative)
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 not Waze (Score:3)
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.
Vienna Virginia solved this (Score:2)
https://www.viennava.gov/Docum... [viennava.gov]
Re: (Score:2)
...And if I get ticketed for driving on a street my tax dollars payed for, I'm suing the city responsible into insolvency.
A city near me in South Florida tried that for a bit. They got smacked down HARD. As they should have.
Re: (Score:2)
It's called property taxes and living in a society. Everyone pays for maintaining "their" portion of street and sidewalk and in return you can use someone else's portion of street and sidewalk. How would I go about charging anyone that crosses my property line?
Re: if the world is not flat (Score:5, Funny)
where in australia?
Salzburg.
Re: (Score:3)
No, an anti-scientific non-sequitor posted on a tech blog by an Anonymous Coward must be a troll.