- The cut-through disputes “are an unintended consequence of this great technology that is supposed to help people avoid sitting in traffic,” said Paul Silberman, a traffic engineer with Sabra, Wang & Associates in Columbia, Md.
One solution to this problem could be to make residential areas car free. You could have a large parking lot at the entrance and everybody walks/bikes inside the neighborhood. Would require a huge cultural revolution, though. But I can say I'd appreciate living in such a neighborhood. And my kids would, too.
I can speak from experience that it is incredibly nice to have everything you want within walking distance or a short bike ride away. But it is incredibly hard to make such a shift unless you're developing something new or seriously invest in walkable, bikeable cities (not just neighborhoods). Or if you're in a European city, but I doubt that's what you meant.
That's why I was suggesting a large parking lot at the entrance of the neighborhood, so that people can still use their cars for longer errands. Not sure how realistic that is, though.
Rhetorical question: is some of this the blame of infrastructure planners? It's probably simplistic, but I see two types of residential streets. There's the classic grid, and there's the windy roads where nothing goes anywhere. My experience is it's the latter, the windy roads, that feel like they have heavier traffic. My theory is the grids have so many options that everyone disperses over numerous roads while the winding roads have pinch point upon pinch point, funneling everyone toward and then onto the one road that actually goes somewhere. So I hesitate to blame Waze. Why did it funnel a couple hundred cars down a residential road? Because it couldn't funnel them down four parallel roads.
I don't think so. Residential streets shouldn't expect heavy traffic, and it's ridiculous to design them for it. I agree. The administration and legislators are to blame. Well, not "blame", they couldn't have anticipated this. But, They're the ones who need to solve this problem. Residential streets shouldn't need to be designed for heavy traffic, nor should it be illegal to tell people about shortcuts. The solution, besides adding capacity to main thoroughfares, is to create laws and systems to prevent abuse. For example, No Thru Traffic signs, speedbumps, and systems allowing residents to submit evidence of lawbreakers (because police can't patrol every residential street). And whatever else legislators and the administration (mayor, governor) can come up with. That's their job.is some of this the blame of infrastructure planners?
So I hesitate to blame Waze
I don't like the point of view taken in the article. It's a very selfish perspective to say that only people who I personally tell should be allowed to drive through my street. I understand the dislike of traffic, but when traffic gets routed through multiple locations, guess what? The cars disperse faster and stop being traffic. I think Waze is an ingenious idea, and I don't intend to stop using it because some people don't want cars on their streets.
While I can appreciate this opinion - I think it relies too heavily on human behavior. What Waze fails to take into account (IMHO) is that public infrastructure wasn't built for it. Sure... you can route a couple hundred cars down the street I live on - because it's "open" but Waze doesn't know about the kids playing basketball or riding bikes. It doesn't know that I'm out there with weed wacker getting those tricky ones that sneak up next to the telephone pole. Another failing - isn't really Waze's fault, but is exacerbated by Waze, is that people don't obey the speed limit. Look - I'm as guilty as the next guy. mk will tell tales of my complete reckless abandon as a young driver... but seriously - doing 5 over on a city street where the limit is 45mph - ok - that's a fudge-able amount. Doing 5 over (or still doing 45) on the 25mph neighborhood street because you're in too big of a hurry to wait through some traffic.... is a bad combination. Humans are REALLY bad at gauging speed. Again - I acknowledge that this IS NOT THE FAULT OF WAZE.... but when you send commuters down neighborhood streets... it's potentially lethal. I see both sides of this. Waze is cool - but I think should probably place some kind of heavier "cost" on neighborhood streets.
Naaah, fuck that. Waze is a piece of shit. It will deliberately route you on a side street to see if it's faster so it can send everybody else. It turns you into a worker ant for the swarm. Waze will send hundreds of cars spiraling off the interstate (leaping across four lanes of traffic to do so) because it's decided that by hopping off and hopping on you can save a minute. Waze will say "you don't get to use this because you're driving" and then you say "I'm a passenger" and it's all okay. I know too much about traffic counts. They matter to me. And 30,000 cars a day is a four-lane commuter feeder. When a residential street gets 45,000 cars a day, that's the equivalent of 20x the wear it's supposed to get. Realistically speaking, that will turn a neighborhood into a potholed war zone within a season or two. This is the externality of Waze - it moves the traffic from the areas it's supposed to be to the areas it was never intended to be. It is not a victimless crime. It turns a livable neighborhood into a war zone. And somewhere, there's a clever lawyer writing up a class action lawsuit against Google for damage to property values. Somewhere, there's a municipality looking to send Google a bill for premature destruction of roads. Somewhere, there's a public health organization making a tally of the damage to children and families due to traffic bouncing from freeways to quiet streets. Because you know what? If the freeway is a problem, fix the freeway. Invest in mass transit. Provide incentives to work from home. All that shit. But handing it over to Waze makes all that stuff not happen. Instead, quiet neighborhoods take it in the ass.
I didn't realize that densely populated neighborhoods are now war zones... Living is a large city is going to expose you to pollution. Living in a growing city is going to expose you to change and density increases. Its unreasonable to expect the city to stay the same around you and not have shifting traffic patters, and more people driving on your street. So the road wears out early, and has to be repaired theoretically one could use this as an opportunity to build a side walk and build it as a higher volume road. Repairing a residential street should be significantly less disruptive than a major thoroughfare. Yes they do, and they should because they are in the middle of a city and have been resisting density that should have occurred naturally. Instead though zoning and NIMBY actions density wasn't allowed to increase because rich people lived there and they complain the loudest. A lot of areas of town lack proper roads in them because communities complained loudly to keep others out. Nobody wants a large road though their neighborhood but this is the inevitable consequences and is the net most efficient way to get people from one end of town to the other. It turns a livable neighborhood into a war zone.
When a residential street gets 45,000 cars a day, that's the equivalent of 20x the wear it's supposed to get
Instead, quiet neighborhoods take it in the ass.
A street that goes from 1000 cars a day to 45,000 cars a day in the course of months is not a "densely populated neighborhood." It's a neighborhood experiencing the externalities of someone else's business model. A family that moves somewhere because of the qualities of that neighborhood has, indeed, experienced a tort when an organization colludes to destroy a fundamental aspect of that neighborhood. Every urban planning study you care to quote will tell you that there is zero upside to building higher volume roads. High volume roads mean sprawl, delayed 911 response and cultural isolation. Building high-volume roads through low-volume neighborhoods destroys neighborhoods. Beverly Hills is Beverly Hills because it fought a freeway along Sunset Blvd. Commerce, CA is Commerce, CA because the 110 slices right the fuck through it. Neighborhoods do not benefit in the slightest from commuter traffic passing through. Neighborhoods benefit from isolation from traffic. NOBODY (No. Bod. Y.) lacks proper roads because of isolationism- "proper roads" come from property taxes, which come from property values, which are destroyed by high traffic counts. Large roads are not an "inevitable consequence." Large roads are the result of negligent urban planning. Waze is not an urban planner - they're an urban exploiter. They are, effectively, an architectural virus. The way to preserve a city is not by letting the contagion run its course, but by inoculating against the disease.
Lets take for example a street that goes from 1000 cars a day to 46,000 because it saves people 2 minutes. That means that every day 90,000 minutes are saved every day. That means that on arrogate the people of your city have 1000 hours a day to play with their kids, hang out with their family, make dinner and relax. Since time is money that could also convert to $15,000/day of lost productivity @$15 an hour. So in my opinion Waze is a public good and a nuisance to those well off folks that feel entitled to inconvenience others for personal benefit. You argue that government urban planners know better and traffic flow should follow the patterns that they had envisioned. I think traffic should flow like water or current down the path of least resistance for optimal efficiency. Waze acts as an equalizer it doesn't care if you are rich or poor, if your neighborhood is politically influential or not. An urban planner would never dare run a major thoroughfare though Beverly hills due the political blowback, or even a bus line connecting two poor parts of town. From a fairness standpoint if that's the most efficient route that's exactly where it should go and you should not have the right to exclude people from traveling through your hood or street.
A public good that does private harm. It's very easy to plug numbers into numbers and get numbers. This is one of the reasons few people consider externalities. They are the numbers that don't have numbers so they tend to get hand-waved away. By your math, saving 45,000 cars a day saves the city, at large, $15k a day. 'k. More simply put, it saves 33 cents per person on the road. How many people are there in the neighborhood? Let's say there's a thousand for magical, easy math. Do you think they'd trade $15 a day to have their neighborhood back? That's $5k a year. Probably a healthy chunk of their property taxes. Do you think they're entitled to throw up a 30-cents-per-car toll booth? I'll bet you don't. After all, they didn't build that road. But their property taxes paid for it. Everyone's property taxes paid for it. Thing is, their property taxes are related to the assessed value of their homes, and having a constant stream of commuters is kicking their property taxes in the nuts. How much? Well, externality. Hard to say. How much is due to the bad roads? how much is due to the increased pollution? How much is due to the assessor fearing for his life as he tries to cross the street? That's just the semi-easy stuff. What are the public health costs of having the air pollution that much closer to homes? The increased noise? The decrease in safety? Harder to put a number on, but no less real. But all those people on Waze are going to flip their shit if someone builds a lemonade-stand-style toll booth because our freedomz. I shouldn't have to argue that urban planners know better. That's what they do. They plan. There WAS a freeway planned through Beverly Hills. It would have done exactly what you wanted - "flow like water down the path of least resistance." The rich people won and the Westside is a neighborhood. The poor people lost and Commerce/Downey/et. al. are a wasteland. I can honestly say you don't know what you want. Splitting time between LA and Seattle, you get to see two visions: the "build roads everywhere" apocalypse and the "please god let's not turn into LA" congestion. Congestion is better. Thirty cents a day to save two minutes. What does that buy in vanpools? What does that buy in bus routes? What does that buy in mass transit? What does that buy in bike lanes? What does that buy in planned public benefits instead of free-market predation? You could have gotten your wish. Take a peek out the window as you cross the 520. That should have been six lanes through the arboretum. Think about traffic that "should flow like water" and then click around. You might think you want to live there. Me? I've crossed under the 405 on bicycle and I can tell you unequivocally that I do not.
I haven't crossed 520 since the tolls came up. I dont go to that side any more unless I absolutely have to and then I just use I 90 and go in non traffic times. I dont think 6 lanes on 520 would have been a bad thing it would have prevent the 3-2 carpool lane merging shit that was constantly clogging it up on the east side. The bigger problem is that I-5 cant be expanded due to the problem with the convention center. Not sure if that was a problem back then though. As a counter example the rich folks on mercer island have a highway running through their little paradise and I dont see them suffering too much. The bigger problem with the Thomson express way is that it would have cut the city up too much and made too much unusable space. There would have been 2 highways running parallel to each-other less than 2 miles apart which would have kind of been a waste of space. Some of those routes actually make a lot of sense though. The Nortwest expressway extension was my commute route when I lived in the Ballard area for example and worked north. The Bay Freeway (that instead became the mercer mess) 5th street bridge and the Vashon island connection all could have made sense (although costs could have been prohibitive). None of this is really all that related to the original issue of pushing relatively low speed traffic down city streets. There are places in Seattle where that hasn't happened but almost anywhere South of 85th this is already a thing and density is high enough that residential streets dont really exist any more per say except in some corners of Ballard. Once you have enough people living in an area it really doesn't make sense to treat the area the same way you treat a sprawling suburb neighborhood and try to block people from traveling through.Take a peek out the window as you cross the 520. That should have been six lanes through the arboretum. Think about traffic that "should flow like water" and then click around.
The rich folks on Mercer Island whined their way to the most expensive project in state history (at the time; UW Electrical Engineering building somehow cost more) to have the 90 go under their little paradise. They ain't dumb. And this isn't 6 lanes on 520 we're talking about - this is six lanes slicing through the Arboretum and UW on its way from the Rainier Valley to Lake City. The road itself isn't the issue - it's what the road does to the turf it cuts through. As you say yourself: Yet you seem to be arguing that an unplanned expressway is preferable to a planned expressway. Why? Right - at some point you need to figure out how to move the people without destroying the neighborhood in the process. Thus, urban planning. Thus, Waze the externalizer of neighborhood blight, thus why I hate Waze and why I think they will be sued into behaving eventually.The bigger problem with the Thomson express way is that it would have cut the city up too much and made too much unusable space.
There are places in Seattle where that hasn't happened but almost anywhere South of 85th this is already a thing and density is high enough that residential streets dont really exist any more per say except in some corners of Ballard. Once you have enough people living in an area it really doesn't make sense to treat the area the same way you treat a sprawling suburb neighborhood and try to block people from traveling through.
Nothing revives my dire hatred of Waze like being in LA. One of the great things about Seattle is Google doesn't have a fucking clue how to get around. Follow Google in Seattle and you'll think it's trolling you. Bitch tried to send me up a one-way street once. LA? LA everyone is face-down in Waze or Google, and following everything they say like Pod People.
Not only is it dangerous for children and animals in residential streets, they also literally weren't built for it. Residential streets aren't designed to handle that level of capacity, and will cost much more to repave a subdivision grid than a highway designed from the ground-up for high traffic levels. Are Waze and its customers going to pay for the repavements? The solution seems obvious to me, and the article mentions it: No Thru Traffic. The city should put up signs, and create a system whereby any resident can submit video evidence and get drivers ticketted. Problem solved.What Waze fails to take into account (IMHO) is that public infrastructure wasn't built for it