Guess what, people would absolutely get sent to the major roadways if (and only if!) those roadways would actually get people where they want to go, faster. If those roadways suck compared to the alternatives, then that points towards a duty of the major to improve those major roadways (which are obviously overwhelmed even after Waze helps by redirecting some traffic off of them), not a duty to drivers to simply suffer every day while sitting in a traffic jam on the "gov't recommended" route or the likes of Waze to keep mum about better alternatives.
The article mentions the 'LA Complete Streets Official Guide' listing which streets the planners designated as arterial vs non-arterial - guess what, if there's a mismatch between the plan and how people can reach their destinations most efficiently, then it is the plan that's wrong and needs to change, not the drivers. If you plan and build a wider, "faster" arterial route that's actually a huge diversion and drivers take shortcuts instead of following your route, well, too bad you wasted a bunch of money building a road noone needs based on a bad plan, it's not the fault of drivers that this road doesn't suit their needs.
The city was free to use its partnership with Waze to determine where to build(improve/widen/regulate) roads and intersections that would be a better fit for how people want to travel. However, instead of listening to the people through that data, they wanted to use it to tell people how to get where they want to be in a way that suits interests of city planners instead of the driver - and that's not how it works.
I think you are failing to differentiate between use and abuse. Roads have a specific purpose. Small, narrow side streets in dense, highly populated neighborhoods are not meant for heavy thru-traffic. Drivers using them for that purpose are, in fact, abusing them, at the expense of the people that live, walk, run, bicycle, and park in that neighborhood. In these instances, it is not that the city planners were wrong. The plan wasn't wrong. The drivers heedlessly barreling down streets never meant for that are in the wrong.
> it's not the fault of drivers that this road doesn't suit their needs.
You can't always get what you want. The desire to get to work 5 minutes faster doesn't overrule the right of people to have safe streets to live on. Unnecessarily diverting loads of drivers onto roads not meant to handle them is unethical.
If there's a mismatch between the planners' intent and the posted street signs, speed limits, etc - that's a fault of the plan and the planner's; street signs delineating how drivers should behave on these streets are a key part (if not the main part) of city traffic planning. Drivers have to obey the signs, and they don't have to obey some official's intent - so if some streets have lower speed limits or speed bumps because they're residental areas, then that's completely fine and both drivers and Waze will take that into account when routing.
But in general, if it's a public street, then the public (including nonlocal public!) is meant to be there if they want to; if it's not a private street of a gated neighbourhood then the drivers passing through have the exact same right to use that public street as the people who live there. It's not at the expense of the people who live there, it's simply using your own rightly deserved share of that public street instead of expecting that those other people have a monopoly on it and that you'd need their permission to share that street with you - if anything, you could label the desire to keep others off "their" street as doing so "at the expense" of these other taxpayers. You can plan and build non-arterial streets so that they're more useful for reaching local stuff and less useful for passing through; however, if the locals are allowed to drive through that street with x mph, then arbitrary numbers of other people are (and should!) also be allowed to be there on the same conditions.
I strenuously disagree. You seem to be saying that city planners and traffic engineers have to design with the constraint that a large subset of drivers will take the instantaneously fastest route rather than sticking to intended high-throughout roads.
I suspect that this would have rather poor implications. It means that little residential streets that happen to parallel major streets will get used at their full capacity whenever the major streets drop below 25-ish mph.
This, in turn, likely means that the little streets can’t safely be used by pedestrians and become unsafe for people trying to cross or exit driveways, let alone for kids who want to play.
This sucks. It’s not clear what cities can do about it, but blaming the cities and saying that every last through street needs to be widened is not the answer.
The problems of roads can't be solved by building more roads.
So it's illegal to tell people that a public road might make for a faster route than the one a person is currently driving on?
It seems like the real problem here is shitty urban planning. This is clearly a huge problem plaguing Los Angeles, in many ways beyond just this one. If you want to keep people off streets, pass ordnances that say non-residents can't cut through them. Otherwise, there's not much of a case against Waze here.
If doing so is encouraging reckless driving and causing public endangerment of the residents on the streets, why shouldn't it be? They're clearly contributing to a loss of safety. Especially consider that the kind of person who is willing to shave off 30 seconds a commute by cutting through a neighborhood is unlikely to be the kind of person who would travel the appropriate speed on said street without a cop and radar gun verifying it.
Just a point here, part of the reason maps sucks so bad is that it directs people on these anti-social second shaving paths without informing them.
Maps says turn here... but it doesn't warn you that it's turning you into an antisocial jerkwad (or that its advice is expected to save you 10 seconds but at the expense of a 5% chance of adding 10 minutes and at a cost of at least $1 in more gas).
Often maps suggestions really don't make sense, even ignoring the anti-social factors, once you consider N-th percentile times or fuel costs... but you don't get to choose, they choose for you. Even if you force a particular route, google will frequently try to reroute you back onto whatever they think is the most seconds-shaving.
Your option is to not use the map... which isn't really a great option, since much of the time the map pretty helpful.
Non-residents shouldn’t pay taxes to maintain those roads either then.
Not letting vehicles cut through a neighborhood street means the street serves one fewer purpose, but it means it serves every other purpose much better than before. Maybe it's worth it for some streets, maybe it's not for others. But your statement is a bit like saying you shouldn't need to pay taxes to maintain a school because you're not allowed to drive through it.
A complete road network has greater value than the sum of its components in isolation, and this is true even for components even where you can't use them for non-destination travel.
Following your logic, any sub-graph of roads that can't be transited to other subgraphs should entirely be paid for by the connected properties-- and that clearly is not how we do things.
Moreover, the "if I can, I should" thinking strongly incentives making neighborhoods into single-access navigational cul-de-sacs, which creates worse traffic for everyone when the local traffic for the neighborhood gets funneled into a single choke point and causes congestion.
A month or two ago I saw an image on reddit from florida where someone showed that it was an 8-mile drive to their backdoor neighbor due to a lack of connectivity between neighborhoods. ... that's the kind of garbage roadway network design we'd get if we can only use raw connectivity control the load and character of use of roadways.
This is exactly backwards.
The streets were effectively privatized before, via obscurity. It is Waze that has made formerly private streets public.
They'll be more than "effectively" private if it keeps up, which reduces utility for everyone.
In many cases the arterials don't have anyone directly on them (or only commercial/industrial property)... specifically as part of their intended purpose.
In fact, if the situation isn't addressed in a fair and intentional manner a my vs your issue will be created: wealthier residents will erect gates, block traffic, privatize roads, or move to other locations ... and leave everyone else to contend with the mess on their own access roads, without the political air cover of wealthier people also suffering the same roadway misuse problem.
The navigation apps have no incentive to give you a worse experience by sending you down narrow roads.
Technology has unintended consequences.
Technology owners have feduciary responsibility to continue producing technology.
Negatively affected citizens make a fuss, claim they deserve more rights than other citizens.
Media creates hit pieces, painting the most negative possible picture in an attempt to look like investigative journalism.
Government either ignores the problem, or grossly overreaches, leading to further unintended consequences.
Chaos: Our protagonist, New Tech, arises.
Discord: As a consequence, the first antagonist looms: Unintended Consequences.
Confusion: New Tech is not dissuaded. It moves boldly, embracing what it sees as positive change in the world.
Bureaucracy: Unintended Consequences summons the evil power of Somebody Else's Problem, and reveals their true face: Angry Mobs.
The Aftermath: The Government steps in. They ban New Tech, establish a Committee to Study Somebody Else's Problem, set up a fund for Unintended Consequences, and violently suppress the Angry Mobs.
Recall that, in Discordian 5-act, the protagonist is arbitrary, and usually chosen to maximize irony, bathos, or confusion. Our goal is to remind the audience of how silly it was to think of anything or anybody as morally absolved.
But banning Waze is just a band-aid. The real problem is that the only way to get around LA is to drive. The real solution for LA is to re-think itself as a walkable about city with real public transit options. There isn't enough physical space for everyone in LA to get to where they want to go in a giant, personal automobile while still leaving room for dense housing.
If you are interested in exactly how to redesign a city to make all transit more effective, check out the book 'Walkable City Rules' by Jeff Speck.
[1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/09/citylab-unive...
The architectural principle of Southern NH is that streets are not organized in a grid but rather in a hierarchy. They add more suburban "pods" at the leaf nodes with resulting uncontrollable traffic increases at upper levels.
A street grid scales in an entirely different way in that if you build more grid you add both short- and long-range access at the same time.
A town I live near added "traffic calming" measures, in some cases draconian. (e.g. When the cop catches you turning towards the supermarket when you shouldn't be you tell him that you're entirely confused by the streets in the area, you blow 0.0, and he says he is confused by it too.)
As soon as traffic calming went into place, traffic got much worse on nearby arteries, particularly wait times at street lights.
My current theory is that a good traffic route avoids stop lights like the plague. It's inevitable that you will hit stop lights, wasting your time and fuel. If you go to places where traffic concentrates, traffic will eventually outflow the ability of cars to clear the intersection during the green cycle. So a single traffic light causes you to be stuck for several cycles.
If you think for yourself you realize that you can clear 10 stop sign intersections in the time that you can clear a bad pair of lights.
I don't apologize for any of this behavior because I am making life better for people in the herd by getting out of it.
