[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