Re Town To Fine Drivers $200 For Taking GPS-Guided Shortcuts...

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Mary Shaw <mary.shaw () gmail com>
Date: Wed, Jan 10, 2018 at 2:34 PM
Subject: Re: [IP] Re Town To Fine Drivers $200 For Taking GPS-Guided
Shortcuts...
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
CC: ip <ip () listbox com>


Why not?  I've seen "no through traffic" signs in various places for
decades.

Constitutionality aside, this is a public policy question that emerges from
improvements in technology, specifically the ability to aggregate and
distribute large amounts of information and to add real-time updates to
that.

tl;dr: Drivers aren't the only stakeholders here. The people and towns that
build the roads for specific intended purposes have a stake in keeping the
usage in line with those purposes.

Back when many neighborhoods were built, the streets were designed for
neighborhood traffic. Originally they connected on all sides, more recently
developments have been complex cul-de-sacs. The latter is now regarded as
generally a bad idea, for example because pedestrians and bicyclists,
especially school children, are forced to use major roads to get from place
to place.It remains that there are lots of places where shortcuts exist.
When those are not widely known and mostly used by local residents, they
don't impose a very heave burden on the neighborhoods.

Fast forward to smartphones with GPS and real-time traffic information, and
you open the opportunity for enormous amounts of non-local traffic to flow
through streets that were simply not designed for that load.  As
non-residents, the drivers may feel no connection to the neighborhood,
hence no sense of obligation to drive carefully and at reasonable speeds
(indeed, their noses may be in their phones, because these shortcuts often
involve lots of turns, so they may be even less attentive).

A sensible approach to dealing with this would be to provide the mapping
applications with local policy, such as which roads are designated a local
neighborhoods, and for the mapping applications to incorporate this
information in routing, for example by using neighborhood streets only at
the beginning and ends of routes when the endpoints are in the
neighborhoods.  That is, routing algorithms could incorporate context such
as the objectives of the owners and principal users of those roads, not
just the individual personal objectives of drivers.

So I don't think it's a terrible idea for a town to control traffic on its
streets.  This town chose one simplistic way that is probably relatively
easy to execute.  Another would be to define residential neighborhood speed
limits of, say, 15mph, with both passive (speed humps) and active (tickets)
enforcement in hopes that the slower speeds would discourage short-cutting;
this would address speeding by locals as well. Another approach would be to
get Google, Waze, and friends to accept policy guidance from the road
owners (the towns), but that's not something one town can accomplish on its
own.

This seems like a good thing for a national council of mayors to take up,
also for groups like the national complete streets and pedestrian-bicycle
safety groups.

Mary Shaw

On Wed, Jan 10, 2018 at 6:24 AM, Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> wrote:

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> *From:* Richard Crisp <rdcrisp () earthlink net>
> *Date:* January 10, 2018 at 3:05:48 AM EST
> *To:* dave () farber net
> *Subject:* *Re: [IP] Town To Fine Drivers $200 For Taking GPS-Guided
> Shortcuts...*
>
> I don’t think this is constitutional
>
> Auto-"corrected" by my IPhone
>
> On Jan 8, 2018, at 2:29 PM, Dave Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff () iconia com>
> Date: Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 5:15 PM
> Subject: Town To Fine Drivers $200 For Taking GPS-Guided Shortcuts...
> To: E-mail Pamphleteer Dave Farber's Interesting People list <
> ip () listbox com>
>
>
>
> http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2018/01/05/leonia-streets-off-navigational-apps/
>
> --
> Geoff.Goodfellow () iconia com
> living as The Truth is True
> http://geoff.livejournal.com
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