I disagree. I also think there is a sense that our urban/suburban planning should serve more that just the interests of motorists, and should support activities other than just driving to/from work.

My wife and I used to drive 45 minutes just to park on the outside of a nice residential neighborhood so we could take a walk. Now we can get to family, friends, parks, businesses, etc; just by walking.

Traffic congestion for commuters is a problem, but that doesn't mean that all streets should be maximally employed to reduce that congestion.

It does, actually, because all streets are connected and part of the same network. No matter what philosophy you subscribe to as to what the "goal" of suburban neighborhood planning is, the fact remains that since (almost) all streets are (eventually) connected, and thus the problem of lots of cars being able to drive on streets that you don't want lots of cars on is always going to be prevalent.

A better solution, IMHO, is to borrow an idea from the EPCOT[1] Concept that Walt Disney created...separating what it means to be a "street" into streets/walkways that only pedestrians may travel on, and streets that only cars may travel on. The way EPCOT would have been designed would have limited your ability to park your car very close to where things were congested. Instead, you'd park further away and take the free public transit or walk/bike where you want to go. Cars and supply trucks would always travel underground in a vast network of highways, leaving basically the entire surface of the city looking more like a massive park than a metropolis.

It would have been an incredible leap forward. Sadly, Disney died before his company turned it into "Epcot", just another Disney World theme park.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)

Basically, the problem boils down to suburban streets being too hospitable to vehicular traffic. Remove the center dividing line, remove street parking, and narrow the street down to 18 feet wide at most (this provides just enough room for two SUVs side-by-side). Allow redevelopment up to the new desired edge of the street to make it even more visually narrow. Nobody is going to commute through these kinds of streets.

And an alternative for the low-density suburban junk - replace the asphalt with gravel when it starts needing repairs. Seriously. It's both cheaper and discourages through traffic.

... at the expense of being impassable for road bikes, generating vast clouds of dust (fun for pedestrians), high noise levels (fun for the local residents), being a major pain to plow in the winter, and having the occasional rock spraying from under a tyre damaging paint or smashing someone's windshield.

And throws up a lot of dust and needs to be continuously patched and graded for potholes and washboarding. It can also get ripped to shreds by snowplows if the ground isn't hard frozen. (And even then a lot of material can be scraped off if the snowplow operator isn't good.)

Source: Have a gravel driveway and my family has a house on a fairly long private gravel road.

I remember watching a programme about how they introduced this on a busy city centre road and weirdly it increased traffic flow while also allowing more pedestrian traffic (presumably because people and cars can move simultaneously).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space

http://thecityfix.com/blog/naked-streets-without-traffic-lig...

http://www.wired.com/2004/12/traffic/

Writing based on the experience in e.g. Kathmandu's Thamel district, where the same tiny roadways are shared by all pedestrians, bicycles, rickshaws and dual-way taxi and moped traffic alike. Traffic signs??

It's a totally different traffic culture to what you're used to in Europe, and it does work in its own way.

Thanks for the link; I'll have to check that out further. I think I've run across documentaries for cities that have similar ideas. I think new development planning should definitely take some of these ideas into account, but we also have to think about what we can do on the margin to ensure the livability of our cities.

>> that doesn't mean that all streets should be maximally employed to reduce that congestion.

>

>It does, actually, because all streets are connected and part of the same network...

Maybe I'm misrepresenting what you are saying, but generally I would think that you don't want maximal utilization of all the paths in a network. If there's a shock to the system (say a major artery is closed down due to some chemical spill) then you want alternate pathways to be available to absorb the unexpected load. Using suburban through-ways in such a case is fine. Having significant amounts of regular traffic going through them is not. Systems need slack and redundancy to be resilient.

Now, will non-residents still use residential through-ways to commute? Indeed, that is fine and can't be totally prevented anyway. But hopefully incentivizing people to use major arteries will apply pressure to improve public transit options (in order to make those arteries more efficient) and will help keep residential streets safer for pedestrians, bicyclists, etc.

edit: fixed formatting

That's the symptom of NIMBY.

If we aren't talking about (1) a new transportation method without the same issues, (2) a somehow substantial decrease in cars, (3) a decline in US population that outpaces growth, then we're probably talking either about how to shoulder the problem equitably, or how to push the problem to another neighborhood so you don't have to suffer.

So then, do you agree that having high-traffic going through residential neighborhoods is a problem then?

The parent post's position, as far as I can tell[0], was that the claim "high traffic residential streets are a problem" is itself NIMBY. The argument being that since all streets are part of the same network and owned by the local government, all streets are the same and it doesn't matter which ones are put to the purpose of maximizing vehicle throughput.

In this thread I have made two arguments to the contrary:

- low-traffic residential streets can help absorb excess traffic when there is an occasional shock to the system (large numbers of visitors for a holiday, a major through-way is blocked, etc.)

- low-traffic residential streets enable more communal living.

In other words, there are goals other than maximizing the throughput of cars.

Experience tells me these benefits can be had by poor residential areas as well as rich ones. With this in mind, I think it is clear that high traffic residential areas are a problem that should be addressed. You and others have suggested a host of alternative options that should definitely be discussed. If someone just wants the problem to "go away" yet doesn't care or actively resists attempts to solve the problem on a larger level, then I agree that such a person is a NIMBY. I'm not arguing against the suggested solutions. I'm arguing why we need them.

[0]apologies to the parent post if I misrepresented.

The rest of the streets connect to people's homes, they're full of speed bumps and such and while some do go through, it's a slow and twisty road with no certainty unless you know that street (or peer at the GPS) so you'd never take those roads unless you actually wanted to go into that community.

I find that it strikes a pretty good balance between helping people get where they're going and making sure that people don't have tons of cars zooming right past the front door.

In many places the terrain simply won't allow for a regular grid layout. From my home in Minnesota I can't really go straight north, because there are a number of lakes in the way. There are a couple of roads that manage to snake their way through, but it's all fully built up areas that keep their speed limits low and safe.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Phoenix,+AZ/@33.5083959,-1...

It was pretty nice when I lived there, because getting places using the highway was fast, and then the grid pattern for the rest of it made it incredibly easy to navigate.

The urban planning that would be necessary to slow down but not stop the rising tide would be one that makes property access closer to egalitarian ideals, so that the San Francisco or Palo Alto worker making $60k can also live there without driving far. Homeowners would rather experience more traffic / a battle with Waze than see property prices drop that much. The egalitarianish access to property is an even worse proposition for them by magnitudes.

The amount of traffic in the street is immaterial if you're walking on the sidewalks like you should be.

You don't generally want your infrastructure at max load all the time. You pathways that aren't heavily used so that, if the heavily trafficked area becomes blocked, traffic can redirect to the alternate path without becoming a complete mess.

Besides, just because it is not being employed to serve commuter traffic does not mean it is not being employed. As other people have pointed out: kids often play in the streets. I think this is a good thing, and I think making it safe to be out in your street makes it easier to connect with your neighbors helps foster a sense of community.

Putting houses on courts/circles helps with this, because then it eliminates through traffic, but it isn't always possible.

This is the correct analysis. Unless it's a gated subdivision, the streets are operated by the government for the broad public benefit; not the local benefit of the homeowners.

It is worth framing this homeowners Waze sabotage as a NIMBY problem, because if the cars aren't being routed through their neighborhood, then it's being routed through someone else's neighborhood. The consequence of unequal distribution of traffic burden means that some people shoulder more burden because they lost in some conflict or competition, whether that's the war of politics or not having enough money or whatever.

There should at least be the empty-handed gesture of discussing why other (poor) people should shoulder disproportionate burden.

If people aren't discussing a substantial global reduction in vehicles, a revolutionary new transportation method without the same issues, or a decline in US population that outpaces growth, then they're talking in code about pushing the problem to somebody else.

And what brought us here? Treating people as abstractions. Something we in the tech industry do all too much. Myself included.

A traffic engineer whose designs are only effective when there's information asymmetry is either

A) dealing with impossible project restraints/requirements B) terrible at their job

I'm all for utilization of public infrastructure, but I'm also sympathetic to the homeowners who observe the safety of their neighborhoods decrease as a result of increased traffic volume.

> I'm all for utilization of public infrastructure, but I'm also sympathetic to the homeowners who observe the safety of their neighborhoods decrease as a result of increased traffic volume.

I for one have zero sympathy for people who put up street signs on their own saying no through fare. Personally, I'd say that is a criminal offense.

I have zero sympathy for home owners who think their rights extend to the streets.

There are other ways to increase safety. Stop signs, speed bumps (sparingly!), very low speed limits (I'd say less than 20 mph) are all low hanging fruits.

No, you should not play on the streets every day. Block parties and such that happen infrequently (think once a month and probably only for a few hours) won't be a problem. However, people who say no through fare on their street are guilty of NIMBY.

I find it hilarious that NIMBYs would complain about noise, when they hire gas-operated lawnmowers to keep their lawns tidy for them.

Sometimes it can get out of hand. From http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/pub/nimby.html

  Just a few months ago, in Palo Alto, residents near 
  downtown put up a vicious collection of roadblocks to get 
  cars off their streets. The folly was exposed when a 
  thief escaped because the police chasing him were unable 
  to figure out how to navigate through the warren of 
  closed streets.

http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=4132

(I'm a U.S. suburban Dad with 2 young kids who do stupid things on their bikes.)

Meanwhile, access for emergency vehicles can be pretty important for the rest of us.

Children who aren't taught money management and nutrition will end up having shorter and worse lives on the average. Is that a consequence or a penalty?

I would have written "death consequence", but that doesn't roll as trippingly off of the tongue. Try not to read the subtext instead of focusing on a legal interpretation.

The whole point of my comment was that it's the children who suffer when a parent fails to teach them basic safety, therefore saying "Well when I was a kid, they just taught us not to do this" is kind of disingenuous. That kind of statement seems to be pushing personal responsibility as a superior solution, even though very young children are not responsible for this kind of mistake.

The fact that you phrased things a certain way means that you want things to be perceived in a certain way.

And yes, children do suffer when parents fail. In all aspects of life. We can't legislate that away. It'd be like trying to legislate away stupidity and negligence.

Your emotional kneejerk comment that has nothing to do with what I wrote would surely be very popular on reddit, but this isn't that place, so I'll thank you to kindly stop speculating about what is in my mind and focus on what I actually typed.

We're not placing responsibility on the children, we're placing responsibility on the parents. If your parents are not good at being parents, then you'll have a higher probability of bad events happening to you. Nothing we can do will change that, unless we want to put everybody in a state orphanage so that each child can have equal opportunities.

Here's the quote that I replied to, the ONLY quote that I replied to, the ONLY thing that I was discussing:

"(Shrug) When I was a child, I was taught not to play in the street"

And that quote kinda sounds like placing responsibility on the children. "Here's the solution: Simply have parents who teach you responsiblity. That's what worked for me."

You're putting words in the other person's mouth, which is what you're accusing us of. "kinda sounds". Then you put in quotes a sentence you made up hoping to add legitmacy to your remarks.

Thanks. I prefer to avoid meta-discussions based on emotional content that has nothing to do with the topic of conversation.

> You're putting words in the other person's mouth, which is what you're accusing us of. "kinda sounds". Then you put in quotes a sentence you made up hoping to add legitmacy to your remarks.

I accused someone of putting words in my mouth when they said "childproofed to the extent you probably have in mind". I do not want to childproof the world, and he has no idea what I have in mind.

But what I was doing by rewording the quote I've been attempting to discuss, is a standard tool for achieving understanding. You reword someone else's argument, and then they can either point out how you were inaccurate, or agree with your characterization, either one of which allows the conversation to proceed.

If you don't care to do either of those things, then I guess you're done discussing the actual topic that this whole thread is about. In which case I think I'm done here.

If you were not taught correctly OR did not absorb information, nothing will prevent you from dying a messy, easily preventible death.

That's the main point which you're dancing around.

Or perhaps these parents understand that even the best parent can make mistakes. Kids are crazy. My 3.5 year old was out of sight for about a minute while her mom went to the bathroom, and she managed to move a potty chair over to the front door, undo the deadbolt (which she had never even attempted to do before), opened the front door, and went walking down the street. Shit happens. Kids are dumb. It's nice to have more than one layer of protection.

It's a great revenue generator for the local PDs. Lots of one-off traffic laws that people passing through won't (and really, can't) know about.

21461. (a) It is unlawful for a driver of a vehicle to fail to obey a sign or signal defined as regulatory in the federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, or a Department of Transportation approved supplement to that manual of a regulatory nature erected or maintained to enhance traffic safety and operations or to indicate and carry out the provisions of this code or a local traffic ordinance or resolution adopted pursuant to a local traffic ordinance, or to fail to obey a device erected or maintained by lawful authority of a public body or official.

If they have to 'err on the side of caution', then the residents win, despite having no legal right.

I don't know why you'd think it couldn't be greater than the cost, either. It takes, what, five minutes to write a ticket, which might average $100? That's $1,200/hour of revenue. No way the officer costs that much, even including benefits and equipment. Most people just pay tickets, they don't contest them, so court costs will be small.

That said, 5 minutes per ticket pretty much requires offenders to present themselves in a nice, orderly line. A more normal scenario where the officer has to cruise around, pull someone over, get out, talk to the person ("no no, I'm not passing through, my sick uncle lives over there"), write the ticket and get back in the patrol car, I'd guess closer to 15 minutes as a lower bound.

Also, doesn't Waze have a feature where you can warn other driver against this kind of thing? That would further reduce the ticket-rate.

Officers get exactly that when they set up shop in a place where they know there are going to be plenty of violators. Highway 66 inside of the DC beltway is HOV during rush hour. The police will just sit at the end of the on ramp and write tickets for everyone trying to cheat HOV or with expired tags or inspection. Makes for a great haul, especially because HOV tickets are $125 for the first offense, $250 for the second, $500 for the third, and $1000 for the fourth.

No real reason to make a DUI checkpoint in the end of a cul-de-sac, is there?

California even has a law preventing cities from creating these kinds of local vehicle code laws that could generate local revenue.

The 'unofficial' policy of parking enforcement here is to ticket everything you see, regardless of whether or not the car is actually in violation of something.

They know it's far cheaper for drivers to just pay the fines than it is to fight the tickets. Arguing a parking ticket can literally take several entire days. Forget just contesting them in writing, the written appeals are automatically denied every single time. I don't even think anyone reads them, there's probably just some flunky at a desk who opens them and immediately sends them back with a pre-printed denial letter.

It's what I'm doing in Chicago, and it's actually not as much money as you'd think it is. Don't get me wrong, it's still a lot and is about as predatory as it gets, but it's not in the billions, compared to many other things.

Of the parsable ones I have, the total since 2009 up until March of this year, there's been a total of $764,775,070 marked as "paid". Tickets marked with a bankruptcy flag has added up to 18,433,390.0.

Wanted to finish up some code to get better output, but I have to run.

Of course I just paid it.

i've heard about a couple of apps for this sort of thing, e.g. http://www.parksafela.com

At the very least, it might be paying for itself....

economies of scale!

> "But the plans were on display..."

> "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

> "That's the display department."

> "With a flashlight."

> "Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

> "So had the stairs."

> "But look, you found the notice didn't you?"

> "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"

But most places display it prominently, and people just don't care. For every case like yours, there are a hundred places with obvious signs like "No turn on red" where people still turn on red.

You could blame me for this, or we could ponder the implications of the different probabilities of various sign types being obeyed, and whether high rates of disobedience might indicate fairness issues that should be carefully managed.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that a law which is frequently broken may be a bad law, but "reading and obeying traffic signs" is not a particularly high bar to clear. If such signs get ignored, it's because the average driver is horrendous at driving. The only solutions to that are vastly better driver training and testing than we have now, or autonomous cars.

I'm not sure there is a high rate of disobedience here, though. The article seems to be talking about places where such laws don't exist, although the residents may try to change that.

I suppose they can't crowdsource that information or people would lie.

There must be a system for getting traffic information from municipalities to the road databases. Apple Maps told me there was no way to drive home a couple days ago, on examination the street in front of my house was marked as closed for the day, they were paving. That is essentially a zero traffic street in a grid area but bisected by rail road tracks without a crossing, so no one uses it except the people who live on it.

Improperly posted signage is generally a defense against an offense of disobeying a sign.

The article used Clinton Street in Portland as an example. Who was upset that Clinton street was being used as cut-through by impatient drivers? Homeowners along Clinton were among those calling for change, but the loudest voices calling for diverters to reduce through-traffic were people who commuted or traveled along Clinton through methods other than cars. People who biked or walked down Clinton were used to it being a pleasant, low-speed, low-volume road where they could ride with their kids without fear. "Neighborhood greenways" like Clinton make up a huge portion of Portland's bike infrastructure, and people using it to escape traffic on the major arterial 2 blocks north were destroying that.

The roads don't belong to the people who live on them, but they don't just belong to drivers, either.

Not that any ever have, or would ever likely have reason to, or that there is any way they could enforce that if the military decided they needed to do that for some reason, but Takoma Park felt they needed to make that clear to the world.

I hope what happened in my neighborhood doesn't happen in yours. One person vetoed a stop sign that would have made our street much, much safer due to the blind curve and how fast people take it. The one home owner that objected scuttled the entire thing. Very frustrating.

I still can't understand this logic of "let's make the roads safer by making them more dangerous" as if the only factor is how fast people are going. Wouldn't it be better to make roads that are safe at the speeds people want to drive? Build sidewalks so pedestrians don't have to be walking in the street etc., and let bicycles use them because a bicyclist is clearly more like a pedestrian than a car?

http://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/05/27/compelling-evidence-th...

But to get that tiny bit you're still paying the entire cost of slowing vehicles down. It takes longer to get where you're going, including for emergency vehicles. The most fuel efficient cruising speed for most vehicles is at or above 40MPH, which you're diverging from.

You're paying full costs for fractional benefits. You would be better off putting some cops on the side of the road with an EMP cannon to disable any cars that show up. Sure, it sounds crazy, but it improves safety by slowing people down so we should do it, right?

Except that there are other, better ways to improve safety. Like building sidewalks, and making sure there is enough capacity on the highways that people don't come down to surface streets to avoid it, and improving mass transit so there aren't as many people driving to begin with.

And now you're doing something different than the data and will plausibly get a different outcome. If the opposing traffic is not closer together then maybe people don't slow down as much or at all anymore. And you're pushing the cars closer to the pedestrians.

> To wit, this conversation revolves around residential neighborhoods, where cars frequently park on the street, where the speed limit is likely not 40MPH.

Yet that may nonetheless be the prevailing traffic speed, and the speed that emergency vehicles can reasonably travel when not impeded by "traffic calming" measures. That you didn't expect people to get the efficiency you're taking away from them doesn't mean you aren't taking it away. Moreover, fuel efficiency is a curve with an inflection point somewhere above 40MPH. That means 40 is better than 30, but it also means 35 is better than 25 and 30 is better than 20.

> Making the lanes narrow is meant to get people to follow the speed limits, I'd say at 30MPH or less.

Except that the speed limit is generally supposed to be set at the 85th percentile traffic speed (and is generally set ~10MPH below that for reasons of politics and revenue generation), so slowing down traffic will lead to a reduction in the speed limit.

At a glance, it looked like a state police cruiser.

If the answer is zero, and the curve otherwise meets traffic-engineering best practices, well... stop whining.

If the answer is nonzero, maybe there's a solution other than putting up unnecessary stop signs that will just discourage respect for traffic laws in general.

But we don't have enough data to say for sure in this thread, and emotional appeals don't help at all.

Pouring more concrete is not the solution, it's a policy problem, particularly when rat runs are used to circumvent congestion charges.

(That's not to say we shouldn't build more traffic calming for residential streets; we should do that merely because many traffic planners are stuck in a 1950s mentality and design residential streets that feel like a highway, hostile to anyone not speeding through them at excessive speeds.)

Maybe not, but I think the conceit here isn't about what you do on your property vs. utilization of public roads by...well...members of the public.

I think the best idea is to do build the roads so that there is a single middle lane, surrounded by nice cobblestone refuges that is possible to drive on slowly. Also add some space for bicycles and pavements for pedestrians.

If people are speeding, surprise surprise cops are helpful. Towns need to work WITH waze not against it. I can imagine towns REALLY cranking up fines to use speeders on usually quiet streets (where kids may be playing) to ensure that the money flows into creating appropriate barriers.

There was a neighborhood where I grew up that had speed bumps in a neighborhood that were smoothest if you hit them at about 40mph. That did nothing but INCREASE traffic speeds (myself included).

We've got speed bumps in our neighborhood. They suck, and people just speed over them anyway.

Ditto using stop signs as traffic calming measures. YAY, let's increase air pollution (fuel burnt), increase noise pollution (accelerating and braking vehicles), increase water pollution (brake dust and other byproducts) and waste everyone's goddamned time by making every single car come to a stop (regardless of cross traffic or pedestrians) just so that some NIMBY can think SOMETHING WAS DONE.

I've noticed this myself in certain areas, the speed bumps taken at higher speeds cause less issues, but it still of course increases wear and tear on motor vehicles, in most cases unnecessarily so.

It was taken out a few months later because of noise complaints. Turns out the locals preferred the people going a bit too fast to the people downshifting, breaking, clanging over the speed bump and then accelerating away.

The best way to keep a street quiet is to remove the cues that tell drivers that they can drive quickly. Narrow the street, remove the sidewalks, add trees and other visual noise to the margins, and remove lane markings. Replacing asphalt with gravel can also help (and is cheaper to maintain).

You don't need to fine people to get them to slow down if the road is terrifying to drive on at more than 20 MPH.

I don't think you're going to find research to support that. At least, I couldn't. http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6419/do-speed-bu... has some interesting discussion of it.

I'm a big fan of the other advice, though, about changing the road design to discourage speeding.

Or possibly it's for buses.

I've also seen a police cruiser Crown Vic with lights and sirens take some speed "humps" at a surprisingly high rate of speed without issue.

Anyway, point being the homeowners did not buy that road. Previous generations of taxpayers paid for the construction of most roads, and the current generations of taxpayers are paying upkeep on all muni roads, not just the ones they live on.

Even if I agreed with you, most of the people taking residential detours are probably still local...which means they, too, paid for the roads!

Unless of course Waze paid the full cost of that little town planning and civil engineering project? But I doubt it.

For instance, "Nobody owns this street, so I can do whatever I want with it," could be portrayed as being equally entitled.

How is this not the same NIMBY entitlement? "There are too many people using this public road, let's make it more arduous to use and let someone else suffer the traffic." That doesn't actually reduce traffic, it only redirects it. And if the people now receiving the traffic respond in kind to restore the original balance all you've done is put up more stop signs, which cause vehicles to stop and then have to accelerate again, increasing air pollution and climate change and redirecting more money to terrorism-supporting countries.

My concern about the traffic isn't NIMBY in nature because I don't care whether anyone drives down the street as long as they do it safely. So rather than "not in my backyard," it's "in my backyard is fine as long as you do it safely."

It isn't arduous to use the road, any redirected traffic is going back to the main streets meant to handle it, and jet fuel can and did melt those steel beams--not the three-way stop on my street.

And it's not just wasted fuel, it's wear on the vehicles (which harms used car reliability and negatively impacts the poor), stress on the vehicle occupants, time wasted, delayed emergency response time, etc. Multiply by a hundred million stop signs and turns into something worth optimizing.

There will be a lot more flashing yellows in a few years.

By the same token, every plastic spork is funding terrorism.

Of course it is. Petroleum is a global commodity. If there is more demand anywhere then the price goes up and all sellers make more money.

> By the same token, every plastic spork is funding terrorism.

Only the ones that aren't recycled. Make sure you recycle your spork.