Navigation Apps Are Turning Quiet Neighborhoods into Traffic Nightmares

Megalith

Megalith

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One New Jersey town has had enough of navigation apps sending legions of commuters down its streets, which weren't meant for more than a handful of cars at any given time: starting in January, Leonia will close 60 streets to everyone but residents and workers at peak driving periods.

“Without question, the game changer has been the navigation apps,” said Tom Rowe, Leonia’s police chief. “In the morning, if I sign onto my Waze account, I find there are 250,000 ‘Wazers’ in the area. When the primary roads become congested, it directs vehicles into Leonia and pushes them onto secondary and tertiary roads. We have had days when people can’t get out of their driveways.”
 
Ah yes , nothing like Waze pushing me into some quite neighborhood with 1000 other cars , what wont you do to shave 10 minutes off your ride.
 
I find this funny.

Most of the articles on this subject, deal with the increased risk of pedestrian safety (think of the children walking across the street).

This is literally people complaining that they cant get out of their driveway for their daily commute, because of others daily commute. What is the overall goal here, if they block off the roads, that increases congestion on the main roads, which the blockers are trying to get to in the first place.
 
Leonia will close 60 streets to everyone but residents and workers at peak driving periods.
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So how will a resident get into the street if its closed? You'll have a cop stopping everyone and checking for id?
 
T_A said:
Ah yes , nothing like Waze pushing me into some quite neighborhood with 1000 other cars , what wont you do to shave 10 minutes off your ride.
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Yeah that is the biggest stick in the ass with these apps, the time savings are not really that significant unless there is a MAJOR roadblock (super bad accident, etc). They divert a very small fraction of the total cars too, so they don't make the freeway any better, and they end up screwing up a community.

IMO, the city should just have planned road construction right at the offramp during commute times if they really want to get people from going onto city streets. Nothing stops people from taking an exit than a huge line of cars stretching for half a mile on the freeway waiting to exit and a crap ton of people trying to merge in at the last minute.

Or a simplier and cheaper method, put up a traffic light at the offramp that you control the timing to, simply have short green light and longer red lights and people will only be allowed to trickle onto the road ways at a rate the local streets can absorb, it really doesn't take that much time to really slow traffic down.
 
There was a similar US supreme court case back in the 50's or 60's about a similar issue. One state tried to close off its roads to interstate truckers who were not based in that state with the claimed reasons of reducing traffic and saving wear and tear on the roads. That got shot down fast.

It would take a real incompetent judge to allow a municipality to isolate itself from all non-residents and approved visitors for several hours a day forever.

Edit: in my first google search for the case above, I found this: Amer. Trucking Assn. v. Scheiner; 483 U.S. 266 (1987) where Pennsylvania wanted to put a tax on trucks not registered in the state. Also got shot down.

What that town is doing is lawsuit bait.
 
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T_A said:
Ah yes , nothing like Waze pushing me into some quite neighborhood with 1000 other cars , what wont you do to shave 10 minutes off your ride.
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For me Waze pushes me into 'the hood'. So yeah fuck that. Not to mention those same rodes are pothole fields. I mean the worst road conditions you have seen.

I just fire up Waze to see if there is some crazy zomgwtfbbq accident or the like. Then I will take a alt route.
 
This is the fault of the city engineers. It was only a matter of time before more efficient routes were to be found. The fact it goes through quiet residential areas is the shortcoming of the regional engineers.
 
BloodyIron said:
This is the fault of the city engineers. It was only a matter of time before more efficient routes were to be found. The fact it goes through quiet residential areas is the shortcoming of the regional engineers.
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Those city planners are somewhat useless, in downtown toronto they keep approving condos being built left and right, they shrink the roads to let cyclists have their own lane, they ban cars from streets except for streetcars. Obviously these bumblefucks don't want you to drive a car downtown.
 
Looking at the neighbourhood on google maps, I think I see what the general problem with this area is.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/I...b912237e!8m2!3d40.7541248!4d-74.0479255?dcr=0
It has way too many intersections and looks like it was planned out in the 1800's. At some point down the line, someone probably made those residential roads into one way streets, but what they should have done is filled in some of those roads to make them dead-ends.

gxp500 said:
Those city planners are somewhat useless, in downtown toronto they keep approving condos being built left and right, they shrink the roads to let cyclists have their own lane, they ban cars from streets except for streetcars. Obviously these bumblefucks don't want you to drive a car downtown.
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Uh, the roads haven't shrunk in Toronto. It's just that the vehicles got fatter.
And yes, they don't want you to drive a car downtown, because it's congested to hell and back.
It is so bad, that it is entirely possible to beat cars by using a bike, even without any bike lanes, nor by running red lights, nor by putting much effort into it.

The only way you can possibly increase roads in Toronto, is by demolishing entire blocks to redo everything from scratch.

But yes, I do agree that adding more sources of congestion, i.e. high density condos, in downtown TO is not the way to fix congestion issues.
What they really need to do, is demolish the entire, useless, streetcar network and replace a majority of those lines with subway lines and bus/trolley lines.


Yours truly, Guy who spends too much time on Cities Skylines.
 
gxp500 said:
So how will a resident get into the street if its closed? You'll have a cop stopping everyone and checking for id?
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If its anything like my neighborhood, they just have these dumb signs that say no right turn M-F 7-9AM 3-5PM. It's a scare tactic but if enough cars do come through eventually residents call the cops.
 
NickJames said:
If its anything like my neighborhood, they just have these dumb signs that say no right turn M-F 7-9AM 3-5PM. It's a scare tactic but if enough cars do come through eventually residents call the cops.
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Or in a RTFA moment, they give out yellow tags that you have on/in your car that signify you as a resident or someone who works there.
 
Um, yeah, that's going to happen. Maybe city planners will actually be held accountable for their horrible decisions (or just rubber stamping bad ideas) and elect some city planners that know what they're doing, like Centennial, Colorado, where they had a main thoroughfare under construction, and then approved all kinds of construction on the side streets for miles around it, just so many people (including me) have to go miles north or west to get east or south. Blame the politicians.
 
My favorite - I was near Detroit a few years ago and had to pull off the get gas and some food. Th exit we pulled over at looked nice enough. We also had a hotel about 30 minutes away. I think it was Waze, but could have been Google Maps, it directed us through this very ghetto part of town on the way to the hotel. I advised the kids to lock the doors and don't make eye contact. The people that lived down the one street just stared at us...I thought about rolling the window down and doing a Chevy Chase. Excuse me holmes, can I get some directions? (National Lampoons Vacation).
 
steakman1971 said:
My favorite - I was near Detroit a few years ago and had to pull off the get gas and some food. Th exit we pulled over at looked nice enough. We also had a hotel about 30 minutes away. I think it was Waze, but could have been Google Maps, it directed us through this very ghetto part of town on the way to the hotel. I advised the kids to lock the doors and don't make eye contact. The people that lived down the one street just stared at us...I thought about rolling the window down and doing a Chevy Chase. Excuse me holmes, can I get some directions? (National Lampoons Vacation).
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Your car has hubcaps.
 
gxp500 said:
So how will a resident get into the street if its closed? You'll have a cop stopping everyone and checking for id?
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RTFA.
The Article said:
Leonia plans to issue residents yellow tags to hang in their cars, and nonresidents who use the streets in the morning and afternoon will face $200 fines. Its police department has already alerted the major traffic and navigation apps to the impending changes, which will take effect on Jan. 22 from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., and from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week.
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What if you're someone visiting friends and family who live in the area, but you don't yourself? Do you get one of these yellow tags to keep on your car? What if you're merely lost? Is the actual crime the use of a navigation app and your destination?
 
dgingeri said:
More political "fixes" to the problem instead of actually fixing the problem or the cause (government's bad decisions) of the problem.
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Some construction situations are unfixable, short of vacating all the residents and demolishing blocks upon blocks.

That specific area looks like it is screwed and the city would need to tear down all the blocks between Manhattan Ave. and Newark Ave.
Maybe even add another freeway along the Hudson river.
 
Instead of fixing the issue with widening roads or making new ones ...... Lets just block the other public roads and congestion the inadiquate infrastructures.

More Like Waze is telling you your streets suck.
 
Another point worth considering would be better public transit, but having a transit even on par with what the US had in the 30's to the 60's would be unthinkable in the present political climate.
 
I read this and thought hmm How do you pickup your girlfriend for work who lives there and you don't? You now can't drive into the neighborhood with a perfectly legitimate reason to be there? Something like this will be what breaks this up. They arn't accounting for hundreds of legitimate reasons people that don't live there would be there.
 
These apps are just allowing drivers to make the best use of the available infrastructure. Nothing was stopping people that knew the areas well from taking shortcuts before.

Want less congestion? We either need more infrastructure or less people. Most don't care for the less people route, so more infrastructure it is!
 
Teenyman45 said:
Another point worth considering would be better public transit, but having a transit even on par with what the US had in the 30's to the 60's would be unthinkable in the present political climate.
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Public transit simply isn't economically feasible. We've been putting in a bunch in Denver, and every single light rail line had been massively unprofitable, not even making back 1/3 of the money put into them just for operations, on the best lines. Our worst line, the one from downtown to the airport, makes less than 5% of what it takes to run it. The buses make less than half the money put into running them. Yet, lefties keep expanding them, and keep wasting our tax money, and keep wanting to raise taxes more and more. It's horrible.
 
dgingeri said:
Public transit simply isn't economically feasible. We've been putting in a bunch in Denver, and every single light rail line had been massively unprofitable, not even making back 1/3 of the money put into them just for operations, on the best lines. Our worst line, the one from downtown to the airport, makes less than 5% of what it takes to run it. The buses make less than half the money put into running them. Yet, lefties keep expanding them, and keep wasting our tax money, and keep wanting to raise taxes more and more. It's horrible.
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Taking buses for example when you say less than half, at what rate does that include depreciating the cost of new bus purchases, or re-doing the roads to accommodate the bus stops, or the aggregate cost effects of the additional traffic displaced by the buses? More importantly, you need to have enough buses, running on enough well planned routes, and for all of those buses to be timely in keeping schedule. The last time I lived in a city with public buses the two things that kept ridership below what it otherwise would have been were insufficient buses during busy times and drivers that were horrific at keeping schedule. In municipalities and countries where these problems are better handled public transport seems to be effective.
 
dgingeri said:
Public transit simply isn't economically feasible. We've been putting in a bunch in Denver, and every single light rail line had been massively unprofitable, not even making back 1/3 of the money put into them just for operations, on the best lines.
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Public transit is not about profit though. I'm not an economist by any means, but having 1000 less cars on the road (or whatever the number) translates to X more hours of productivity which has some financial value just not to the public transit authority directly. It's no state secret that just about all public transit in this country is in some way subsidized by either tax payers, or people who get parking tickets, or people who pay auto tolls elsewhere.
 
Zepharus said:
yeah... sorry neighborhood people... go fuck yourselves.
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Or like I said, put a street lights on that off ramp, kind of like a metering light in reverse. Slow the amount of cars that get onto local streets as a bypass will do two things, first it won't make it so crowded on the city streets, and perhaps makes the "detour" route a few minutes longer which might be the literally all the extra time saved but the apps say that's worth it.

And for those who don't know what metering lights are (maybe you don't live somewhere where traffic is bad enough to need them), they're simply red/green lights at onramps, they cycle between red and green on some short interval maybe 10-20 seconds. What they do is the give a little bit of pause of car flow onto the freeway so you don't get a huge rush of cars. The downside is cars tend to back up on city streets a bit, IMO where they exist around here that's minimal because the onramps are significant in size, the upside is that traffic doesn't crawl to a stop because you have a bunch of retards who are either ultra aggressive in merging or can't merge for shit. They've been going on around here for not quite 10 years and every place they exist traffic flows MUCH smoother at every on ramp (freeway splits still have issues because well ... people), unfortunately they exist just about everywhere except in San Francisco because San Francisco is like "we don't want traffic piling up on our streets" and yup, all the onramps that go through SF traffic gets fucked up proper style. There is a limitation to how well they work, but they definitely are better than none at all. So like I said flip that shit around and meter the cars coming off the freeway onto the city streets, just at the off ramp exit, have a stop light, it's super easy and would be really effective.
 
gxp500 said:
Those city planners are somewhat useless, in downtown toronto they keep approving condos being built left and right, they shrink the roads to let cyclists have their own lane, they ban cars from streets except for streetcars. Obviously these bumblefucks don't want you to drive a car downtown.
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Toronto hates cars.

And I started feeling a São Paulo vibe way earlier than I would've liked.
 
The town should sell strategic 10 foot segments to private entities. Those private entities can then privatize those sections of the roads. Locals get free tolls, visitors pay $50 per toll gate.
 
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