[ljd]

I've lived in Los Angeles for the last 5 years and I can tell you that Waze really uses neighborhood routes in the hills, which coincides with the most affluent residents in LA.

Unfortunatelly, Los Angeles is built with 3-4 choke points to get from the reasonably priced suburbs in San Fernando Valley to the companies that pay for $100k+ positions on the west side and mid-wilshire.

Waze helps alleviate that traffic and I not surprised that a politician here in LA is so out of touch that he would recommend shutting down a tool most people use to get to work so that the wealthy can have less traffic noise outside their house at 8am.

Streets are public domain, and until I'm relieved of my road tax liabilities I intend on using any one I choose.

[tptacek]

This is in a sense an argument that rebuts decades (probably more) of urban design based on classism. Good cities are designed to have arteries for cars and humane, walkable residential streets for people to live on. Routing volumes of traffic intended for the arteries to residential streets is abusive.

Your argument won't win in the end anyways. If Waze continues causing problems, residential city districts will just vote to put up "no through traffic" signs and start ticketing offenders. Or, like Chicago, they'll keep a strict grid, break traffic up with one-way streets, and put diode-like partial cul de sacs at the intersections of residential streets and arteries.

This idea is pretty old; Christopher Alexander writes about it in _A Pattern Language_.

I'm a little sensitive about this issue; I live in a decidedly un-affluent part of the Chicago area (I'm on one of the least expensive blocks in Oak Park; the block immediately adjacent to mine to the east is part of the Austin neighborhood. We have kids playing on our street all day, and, because we're right up on two very busy streets, we get a pretty regular flow of total assholes doing 40MPH down our street for shortcuts.

[ljd]

I think a speed bump solves your problem.

When I have to commute into the West Side I have a 1.5-2 hour drive ahead of me. Unless I use Waze, and I can cut that down to less than an hour. There is nothing quite like traffic in Los Angeles.

Also, you are assuming Los Angeles was designed correctly and anyone that lives here for longer than a month can tell you it has some serious traffic problems because of urban sprawl.

[tptacek]

I don't know that much about Los Angeles but did quietly presume that a lot of these problems are due to it being irretrievably screwed by terrible urban design: it seems like a place that's very hard to drive in (like New York) that is impossible to live in without driving (unlike New York).

Move to Chicago!

[jamra]

I've lived in LA for 27 years. The problem here is not the design of the city's grid. The problem is the lack of public transportation. The city is not a city like Chicago or New York is a city. LA is a bunch of suburbs dispersed across a very large land mass.

There are too many cars on the road and five lane freeways don't fix the issue. Traffic has been getting worse year by year. If they just offered an appropriate metro, I would take it. If they had busses that arrived more frequently than 30-40 minutes, I'd ride them. Add wifi and I may never drive again.

Maybe this will be the catalyst to finally solve the public transportation problems that ruin this city.

[ljd]

You are spot on. I lived in NYC for a few years for school and LA is just as crazy as NYC for traffic, except you have to drive.

[tptacek]

Here's another way to think about this:

Transit LA is irretrievably screwed by its design.

Traffic relief using residential streets is going to make things only marginally better for commuters (for the same reason that adding buffers to a router has diminishing returns).

Making full commuter use of residential streets is going to make things a lot worse, not just marginally but dramatically, for residents.

Meanwhile, the precedent that residential streets are part of the commuter transit fabric is eventually going to spread beyond the rich neighborhoods, right? That same idea is going to eventually harm lower and middle income residents of other neighborhoods that get coopted into the commuter transit system.

[nostromo]

I'm not sure speed bumps scale -- you probably couldn't put one on every residential block. They also have drawbacks, such as slowing down emergency vehicles.

I think there are much more elegant solutions for traffic calming. Like this: http://i.imgur.com/Jn78gQY.jpg

[marak830]

Im not sure about there, but in Australia our emergency service vehicles are a width where they can drive over speed bumps without actually touching (ambulances at least), my brother built them for a while :-)

[prostoalex]

People in affluent neighborhoods tend to hate speed bumps more than traffic, because (gasp!) they allegedly lower the property values

https://www.realtown.com/Ardell/blog/speed-bump

[leephillips]

Until they put up signs forbidding rush hour traffic for non-residents of the street. At least, that's what they do around here (DC area).

[bkeroack]

There are a few streets off Sunset Boulevard with signs posted: "Dead end street after 10pm". Makes me chuckle every time I go by.

[berns]

And how is it enforced? Do they ask "where are you going"? Can you answer "none of your business"? I never lived in the US but I refuse to abandon my mental image of the free country I always thought it was.

[tptacek]

They pull you over, and if you don't live in the immediate vicinity, you get a ticket. It's happened to me several times in Oak Park, and I live there!

You could say "none of your business". You'll get the ticket, and, if its really unjustified, you can go fight it in traffic court.

[trhway]

>They pull you over,

shouldn't they have at least some probable cause for pulling you over? And wouldn't lack of probable cause make the officer's case a "fruit of poisoned tree"?

and anyway, how about not living there, yet, say for example, having a girlfriend there or going for some appointment, like going to look at the bike somebody is selling or at a house for sale. My point is that without actually living in the neighborhood there may be plenty of reasons to drive there.

[tptacek]

1. No. 2. No. 3. Driving to your friend's house doesn't make you "through traffic", unless you're cutting across someone else's street.

[kinghajj]

"Sorry officer, I got lost and took a wrong turn. I'll make my way back to the main street."

[tptacek]

Yeah, they're just going to ticket you. Do you not get a lot of traffic tickets? The idea that you can HN-argue your way out of a ticket strikes me as the kind of thing you can only think if you haven't had a lot of contact with traffic cops. :)

I mean, you can definitely try to talk your way out of it, and if the cop is feeling friendly, you may succeed. But it's pretty much all down to how nice the cop is feeling.

Your argument is going to come down to "I made a wrong turn and missed the sign that said I can't drive down this block". It's not that much different from the "I didn't mean to drive the wrong way down this one way street".

[kinghajj]

I've never gotten a traffic ticket, actually. You might not be able to fight the cop, but a judge may be easier to sway. They have to show intent after all, no? I've read stories of people fighting such ordinances in court (not that that's a reliable source).

[mikeash]

Getting lost doesn't remove your ability to read signs that tell you not to enter a particular street.

[berns]

But what do the signs say? I'm really curious. Can you visit a friend? Do the police escort you to your friends house?

[kinghajj]

But what if you believed that the street was, in fact, the way to your destination (a friend's house)?

[StillBored]

And hire the off duty sheriff (with HOA fees) to enforce it like the neighborhood I cut through does...

[jefurii]

> Unfortunatelly, Los Angeles is built with 3-4 choke points to get from... San Fernando Valley to... the west side and mid-wilshire.

Public transit in Southern Cali is pretty good if you work in downtown LA.