Hacker News Reader

Comment by gerbilly | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that what is most efficient for getting a car from point a to b is not what is best for society overall.

There are many articles online where people on residential streets got flooded with traffic because of apps like waze.[1]

In the valley we only seem good at solving single isolated problems, and we are remarkably tone deaf to the effects these 'disruptions' have on the rest of society.

1. http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/shortcut-app-waze-1.346300...

View on HN

A good argument can be made that using the residential streets is best for "society overall." The amount it disrupts those who live in the neighborhood could very well be outweighed by a large reduction of wasted time by all those stuck in a traffic jam.

Streets are made for driving upon. If people don't like people driving on their streets, they should vote to get rid of them.

To boot, most people in those neighborhoods SHOULD be going to work anyways, so they shouldn't notice people going up and down their streets for the most part. We haven't hit Japan's retirement-age population level problem, yet.

Don't tell people what they should do. Maybe they work from home, maybe they don't work at all, what the heck does work ethic have to do with it?

"Don't tell people what they should do."

The pure irony of your statement.

There is no irony[1]. I never told people not to use waze, just pointed out the consequences of doing so at scale on existing political arrangements made in society.

1. Perhaps hypocrisy, is the word you really meant. Nobody knows what irony means anymore.

Hypocrisy and Irony are very closely linked hand-in-hand, so closely in fact that the words can effectively be substituted for each other in this instance. It is hypocritical for someone to tell me to not tell someone what to do (and in fact, my 'telling someone what to do' was a suggestion, since voting is not a mandatory thing in the USA where I post from) since they are doing the same thing in effect, and it is ironic since they are effectively performing the very behavior they're wanting me to not do.

I had the last vestiges of a 'good' education, where one could use good logic to explain the usage of a word not commonly used in such a manner. I attended the 4th best independent school district in the nation at the time. That district no longer exists and hasn't in true form for over 20 years. The students are now meth and heroin addicts. My hometown has the title of heroin capital of the USA because the amount of black tar exceedingly overwhelms the COMBINED shipments (calculated) of powder and crack cocaine FOR THE NATION, and has done this consistently since it was featured on Channel One news twenty years ago.

Still no irony, sorry. Nor hypocrisy either.

Your initial comment is being down-voted, perhaps because your post contained an irrelevant prescription for what people should do, and a broad generalization of what streets are 'for'.

Should we all consider the matter settled now that you have told us what streets are for, and informed us that we should all be working?

"a broad generalization of what streets are 'for'"

Streets are designed for the flow of traffic. There has never been any other reason. Source: Former Memphis Civil Engineer.

and I didn't mean should as in "Mandatory" but as in "should be at work at this point and time given typical work days."

But people seem to be too quick to voice their opinion with a click instead of vocalizing it. Oh, yet here on the front page is an article trying to espouse the very virtue of LETTING SOMEONE SPEAK.

That's pretty backwards and pathetic.

Well, they still need streets, so getting rid of them isn't really a solution.

But you just gave me a great idea, inner-city toll roads. Reduces traffic on protected streets and Waze gets to implement a slider how many $ your willing to spend on your shortcuts.

Can they just put up signs that say "No thru traffic"?

That's the same sort of thing as making them useless for through traffic with bollards but is cheaper (and maintains convenience for the residents).

I'd argue the harm to a neighbourhood street far outweighs the needs of people in cars.

It creates noise, discourages kids from playing outside, basically it decreases the quality of life generally when the street you live on becomes a river of traffic.

Basically, this new innovation disrupts a balance that has been achieved incrementally over time.

Go into any neighbourhood and talk to people and you will find that over time they have called the city councillor spoken to each other to come to an agreement about how their street is to be used, from parking issues, to street furniture to common access to some areas such as school parking lots off hours for example.

Some of these agreements are formal, others informal and unspoken, but they always exist.

I don't buy your argument that waze, by optimizing for a single variable, and which ignores all of these agreements between residents can be a greater benefit 'overall.'

Also, by solving the congestion problem this way, they actually divert attention away from proper solutions being implemented at the city level.

This idea that local residents are more entitled to the street becomes problematic, though.

I live in a high-rise condo on a busy arterial road in the city centre. Should my enjoyment of the street override the needs of suburbanites to commute to work daily? I might think so, but somehow I don't think the suggestion that we should force thousands of people onto public transit or bicycles or whatever is going to wash.

So then the question becomes, why are people in certain neighbourhoods entitled to things that people in other neighbourhoods clearly are not entitled to? If others can use "my" street when they please, why can't I do the same on "their" street?

> In the valley we only seem good at solving single isolated problems...

I'd suggest that's precisely because that's how engineers are taught to solve problems (and not just in the valley). Reduce a problem to it's simplest representation (by abstracting everything else away) and solve.

Then maybe that's why these problems were solved in the past by more than just engineers, city planners, politicians individual residents etc...

Right - not just an engineer-agent of the marketing dept

The solution to the neighborhood problem is to make it impossible for a car to use those roads as through streets. Basically you put up a bunch of bollards, so people can still walk and bike through a neighboorhood, but cars would only use the roads to get to a specific destination in that neighborhood. There's a word for this layout, I can't think of it - with the bollards in place, it turns the neighborhood into a maze of hard right and left turns. It's totally pointless to find a work around (in a car).

Portland has aggressively pursued traffic calming and these traffic shaping measures you discuss. I first thought it was brutal and everyone drive really slow. On residential streets, both sides almost always allow forstreet parking, and so the roads don't allow for two way traffic. On other roads they narrow the lanes a lot, using bollards or increasing shoulder.

They realize that traffic is a social engineering problem and not a highway engineering one.

Now I love it. I drive slower when it makes sense to, and I do so because it's what feels right at the slice of road I'm on, not because of the sign that says the max speed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com