Anybody have a link to the actual company? I also think they've missed the key use for this. Modelling traffic movements through a space.
Many villages/residential areas suffer from speeding and rat running, but getting a local authority to take you seriously or even get the local police to 'visit' the speeders and have a word is hard to make happen.
Community speed watch using ANPR cameras to create an average speed monitored area is HUGE. Even working out people that are using the one way road systems incorrectly helps.
This has huge application across multiple resident associations. To achieve this you need to be able to time synch, know the location of each camera, the shortest 'route' between each camera, and the ability to 'network' each camera.
Where do I invest? Hell I have 16 residents associations that would bite your hands off to get their hands on a cheap traffic profiling system.
First time I've heard of "rat running", but am having a hard time seeing the justification for the negative connotation. I can only see it as a more efficient use of the road system.
Just because at some time in the past there was less traffic in your street doesn't mean it won't (or shouldn't) increase in the future.
It seems to me that these residents associations are trying to push the problem of higher overall road use on to others that don't have such strong residents associations.
Rat running is from narrow UK streets, largely residential, being used as through roads rather than access to homes.
The use of traffic aware GPS also encourages more traffic down these roads.
You might think it as efficient but it changes the levels of safety for pedestrians which are usually parents & children at the time of day this is more prevalent.
I don't think it is necessarily a worse overall outcome, even if the small streets become somewhat less safe.
That's probably because you've never lived on a street designed as a local residential area that has been turned into a rat run. Unfortunately, anyone who has would be in no doubt about that being an overall worse outcome. It undermines the structure of most official traffic planning, sometimes with horrifying results for safety, along with a variety of other undesirable side effects.
Ultimately, all roads are not equal. They are often designed for different purposes, and when they are repurposed for things they were not intended for, very bad things can and do happen. This is a real problem with modern SatNav systems directing large numbers of vehicles along unsuitable routes because they're trying to shave 10s off a journey time, and I imagine laws will be passed regulating such systems before too long (this being easier and more practical than designating all the roads in question as access only and then actually enforcing that law).
Blocking off certain streets is exactly what my hometown did. Make it so only certain roads go straight through, others have every third intersection blocked off
I think that it's a reasonable and valid decision for a community to try to restrict through traffic to the main roads such that residential areas can remain quiet/free from exhaust/safe to walk around without all sorts of guardrails and stuff, even if it means less efficiency and more congestion on the main routes.
Why is it okay to push even more of these costs on people around the main route, don't you think that people in all areas should take on their share of these costs.
Also struggling to see how a guardrail could be burdensome.
Guardrails are really ugly, and have been shown to increase traffic speeds -- they make drivers feel safer, since they think they no longer need to look for pedestrians.
I think you might be assuming the aim is to maximize traffic flow, or similar. That's not necessarily the aim of a European city's traffic planners -- they may prioritize pedestrian or cyclist safety, child safety or play space, reducing noise, improving bus/tram speeds, or maintaining a historic appearance. This might be for a single road, a small area, or a whole district.
Several of these can reduce overall traffic. If parents don't think it's safe for their children to walk to school, they might drive them instead -- increasing traffic at the worst time for other children. Similarly for private vehicles obstructing buses and trams.
Road networks often follow a hierarchical design - Freeways fed by major roads, major roads fed by smaller roads, smaller roads fed by residential streets.
The larger roads, obviously, are designed for higher traffic speeds and volumes. Features you might see (depending on how large the road is) include more and wider lanes, restrictions on stopping, fewer curves, better visibility, fewer junctions, pedestrians directed to footbridges or dedicated crossings, better lighting, no buildings opening directly onto the roads, and suchlike.
For example, see [1] blue roads being slower/lower capacity, and orange and red being larger, higher speed roads.
Also struggling to see how a guardrail could
be burdensome.
Consider this narrow road in London [2] which allows you to bypass the traffic lights between Clerkenwell Road and St John St (admittedly at the cost of taking a sharp corner - I've done this on a motorbike). Replacing the bollards with armco barriers would prevent pedestrians from crossing the road.
(IMHO if people don't want a road used as a through road, they should get the road blocked at one end - rather than expecting a legislative solution - and if they don't want the inconvenience of going around, perhaps they should consider that other road users don't either)
Even with an overall hierarchical design, some places still tend to have fairly major roads with houses on both sides, these are the places I'm concerned about, directing more traffic to these major roads from historically less trafficked roads.
I would think having gaps in the barrier, say every five or ten meters would be sufficient?
I like your humble opinion :) that seems like quite a fair solution all around.
Barriers look ugly and don't solve the problem for:
* pet owners (even cats aside, some dogs often escape the house),
* younger kids who don't have the same safety awareness and often just run off,
* older kids who parents would normally trust to cycle to their friends house.
Barriers also create parking problems:
* how do barriers work when you have houses with driveways?
* and if don't have driveways then how do you park on the street now that you've made it harder to get on and off the pavement?
Barriers legitimise speeding down the road which puts cars parks on the street at greater risk of getting damaged (I've seen this happen far to often along rat runs).
Plus there is also the noise polution problem of living next to a rat run. In fact it's worse than along main roads because you end up with car engines revving as they maneuver around parked cars at speed rather than the constant steady drone of cars going past. You have no idea how annoying this is during the summer when you want windows open and the cars are louder than your own bloody TV!
People who move into a main road do so knowingly and are willing to live with the drawbacks it brings. Though often those kind of houses have longer front gardens so the house is set further back from the road and/or hedges or other noise cancelling greenery (sometimes - not always though). But if you move onto a quieter street you do so because you want a safer and quieter environment. Which is why residents protest against their streets being turned into through-roads
Residential roads are usually a destination where kids play in the road or even become good cycle routes as the speed profile of the roads are designed to enable social cohesion. The original purpose of the road has been 'lost' as congestion has increased making the road attractive.
As to guardrails, they create a significant barrier, not only for, say a pedestrian being slammed into them by a car, but also from a neighbourhood community point of view. The problem is not the people walking and cycling, but the people using it as a convenient cut through.
Sounds good, as long as I get to withhold my taxes in proportion to the number of streets that get blocked off by people who feel they're more entitled to use them than I am.
Transport planning is about developing road networks around specific purposes. So a major route would have a higher speed profile than a residential road. Residential roads with lower speed profiles also sometimes expect children to be playing in them and primarily be destinations.
Filtered streets (placing bollards at one end) are a key tool in rebalancing anti-social behaviour primarily caused by congestion on major routes. It is not changing the function of the road, but enforcing the original designed purpose of the road to be an end destination and not a convenient through route.
It is also significant tax saving. Residential roads are not designed for significant volumes of traffic and can suffer significant damage if they become overused.
It is more a problem of large volumes of traffic using roads that were never designed for this purpose.
In the UK, it is fairly common for people to have to park on the street rather than have their own driveways. Some local authorities also require each household to have 2 or 3 refuse bins and, because homes were not designed to accommodate them, these are also often placed at the roadside.
All of this is just about manageable most of the time but imagine the chaos when you get 100's of cars using your street as a short cut twice a day?
Also, your typical 'rat-runner' tends to be a bad tempered person with a tendency to drive over the speed limit (typically 30 mph in the UK, which is quite fast enough for a residential street). Needless to say, if you are unlucky enough to have to live on a rat-run you can expect your car to be damaged two or three times a year.
And, of course, the guilty party always drives off without reporting it.
Oh, and if you have kids - you can just imagine!
Furthermore, the supposed efficiency saving is, at best, negligible since a busy rat-run becomes congested much more readily than the major road everyone is avoiding.
I would be interested to see how the use of lots of small street routes around a main route affects the flow of the main route, and what the efficiency gain generally is.
Maybe it is also in your best interests if the street is modified to accommodate modern use cases.
> I would be interested to see how the use of lots of small street routes around a main route affects the flow of the main route, and what the efficiency gain generally is.
I wouldn't assume there's an overall efficiency gain. That's part of the problem: in many cases, a shortcut that would work if a few cars used it causes problems (jammed intersections, etc.) if too many cars try to take advantage.
Someone who knows graph theory more than I do could comment, but more generally I don't think there's any guarantee that a situation where every vehicle uses a greedy algorithm will result in overall greatest efficiency. I could swear there was an article on this within the last year but I cannot find it.
You're under the impression the government does that sort of thing in the us (modify roads to address demand). In my experience that is largely an artifact of history now.
Imagine people start driving through a park. Pedestrians and bicyclists complain. Drivers respond: This is just a more efficient use of space. If you prevent cars from driving into the park, they'll just cause more traffic along the arterials--that's not fair.
Streets are not fungible "vehicular transportation widgets." They serve many purposes. In many places, relatively quiet neighborhood streets serve as unofficial (but sometimes official) transportation infrastructure for pedestrians and bicyclists, as well as spaces for community. They can only serve this purpose if they are low-traffic. Taking your kids on errands on a cargo bike, or letting them walk to school or to a neighbor's house, or letting them play basketball on the street, or teaching them how to ride a bike--all possible on a low-traffic neighborhood street, all very ill-advised on a high-traffic one.
Higher traffic on these streets expands the space available for motor vehicles, but it literally destroys transportation infrastructure for bicyclists and pedestrians. As someone who lives on a major arterial but commutes (by bike, with kids) on quiet neighborhood streets, I strongly support the diversion of traffic to the former.
The idea is that if a main road has consistently high traffic, some road users will take narrower, less well appointed roads (through villages for example) at unreasonable speeds.
This leads to traffic calming measures as a way to counteract over-use of what should be largely residential traffic. This is also why "Bypasses" became very common - to get high volumes of commuting traffic away from residential areas where possible
But why should it be for residential traffic, if the through traffic is driving within the speed limit? Again, just because the history of a street made it appropriate for relaxed pedestrian use, should that now be in perpetuity?
Maybe a better solution would be to put in barriers.
So, I guess you think that this new driver tracking would be cheaper than traditional obstructions (i.e. speed humps, chicanes, etc...)? I guess it could be, but what are the non obvious secondary and tertiary order costs of tracking all car movement? This seems worrying to me.
Roads are designed and constructed for a certain amount of throughout and vehicle type. The increase in through traffic means greater damages and more expenses.
But how is this different to how the road system has developed from the start? People choose the popular routes by driving on them, then these are the roads that are repaired/upgraded.
I don't know if it's cheaper per vehicle mile to drive on a large road or a small road, but I couldn't see it being very significant, but maybe it is?
Is this the prescriptivist/descriptivist debate from linguistics, applied to road construction?
Increased traffic on a road not meant to take it indicates some unmet demand, but it doesn't necessarily follow that the correct response is to accept the traffic on that road. It may be better to open things up elsewhere.
Finally, there's the problem of externalities. Road traffic has costs to the people nearby, in terms of noise, pollution, and danger. The drivers don't experience those costs, and rarely factor them into the decision of which route to take. Putting a lot of traffic onto a residential road not meant to take it can easily be a net negative.
Maybe it's some limitation of the human brain that causes us to reduce everything to the same recurring roots :)
It may be better to open things up elsewhere, as long as the reason that it is elsewhere is not because elsewhere had a weaker residents association.
I've seen the paradox you mentioned a few times, but I think it is like a lot of paradoxes, interesting but rare and not very relevant most of the time.
It may be a net negative for the people on that street, but overall, I'm not so sure.
I guess it's a fundamental division: do you react, or do you command? But something about this particular conversation reminded me strongly of how it's discussed in linguistics.
These roads are built to a lower standard. If they get more traffic, they will have to be maintained more frequently and/or improved. This is very expensive.
Additionally, there is the safety aspect. It is more than just pedestrians at risk, there are other automobiles and structures to be concerned about. Tertiary streets, for example, probably won't have things like guardrails.
Areas zones as residential should probably not have much through traffic. It is expensive and dangerous. The roads constructed to deal with that traffic are also built to withstand that higher load. Routing the traffic elsewhere will not significantly reduce the maintaining of said roads.
Err... I modeled traffic. Hopefully that explains it. There's some good write-ups as complaints about Waze, if you want a keyword to find more info.
Let's say that a given road has a certain service life, maybe measured in tonne-miles (e.g. a car which weighs 1.5 tonnes and travels a mile on the road would reduce the roads service life by 1.5 tonne-miles) (maybe not a good way to measure it because the damage caused to the road is probably non linear with increasing weight)
What I don't know is if the cost of a small road per tonne-mile service life is any different from the cost of a large road per tonne-mile service life. If the cost difference is negligible then I don't see the problem.
Maybe it is that different parts of the government fund the small roads than the large roads, and the parts of the government that funds the small roads doesn't have the budget to do much road work?
Do heavy vehicles generally use these small streets, it seems like it wouldn't be worth it in a heavy vehicle with most small streets.
You're correct in that it is not linear. The damage increases sigmoidally with weight and is impacted by the number of axles.
The cost differences are huge. A primary road will have been constructed to tolerate the weight and frequency. It's much more expensive to maintain such a road.
In some cases, yes. Maintaining and improving roads will be paid out of different budgets. Federal, State, (sometimes) County, Local Municipality. Tertiary roads are almost certainly out of the local budget.
If it's not expressly prohibited, there's bound to be heavier traffic on these tertiary streets. The heavier vehicles do far more damage.
(There's also safety to be concerned with.)
It's okay to route traffic through these areas when it's an emergency. Occasional use is not going to be a significant impactor. However, with regular use, it's going to result in rapid deterioration.
If you really want to dig into this, here's a link to a study:
Those roads can barely handle the traffic they get because they are so narrow, so people using them at speed to avoid more suitable roads is a problem. It's:
* less safe for residents (inherent to more traffic, but especially so given how close the entryways are to the road), and, for better or worse, there may be children playing in the street
* makes it more dangerous to park there (risk of damage from passing vehicles)
* less convenient to park if you have to negotiate heavy traffic
* adds unwanted noise - typical residential traffic volumes/patterns aren't too bad, but I wouldn't want heavy traffic passing by just outside my front room.
Its negative connotation is well-earned IMO (especially as _anecdotally_ many of the drivers looking to take advantage of such routes drive at excessive speeds for the road conditions). In a lot of cases, the volume of traffic on those roads SHOULDN'T increase - they just aren't designed for it.
I'd also question if it is actually more efficient - with how narrow these sorts of streets are, and the likelihood of people wanting to park etc., you aren't going to get a smooth flow of traffic as people try to negotiate round each other.
> It seems to me that these residents associations are trying to push the problem of higher overall road use on to others that don't have such strong residents associations.
It's mostly a term used where there is a larger road in the vicinity, but people use the residential streets to avoid congestion or take a marginally shorter route. It's not really a case of shuffling the traffic off onto other residential streets.
Among other things, it pushes traffic from commercial corridors (where noise is expected) onto residential ones. Then you get people leaning on their horns right outside your window all evening when you're trying to concentrate on work or are exhausted and just want to sleep - because the way the lights are timed on the side streets means that not everyone makes it through the light (or when the traffic on the arteries is heavy, nobody on the side street makes it through the light).
> but getting a local authority to take you seriously or even get the local police to 'visit' the speeders and have a word is hard to make happen.
Interesting, this isn't my experience. I think this is a size issue. In major cities probably. Out here in the 'burbs, I call the police about a speeder, and there's an officer with a radar gun out within the hour. Speeding tickets are nice funding for the department. Add a reckless driving on there and you got a nice doozy.
What happens more often than not though is you get two really annoying speed humps installed if enough calls about it come through.
Yes especially when and how long people are parked for, couple that with face and/or financial tracking and you can target marketing to people or locations.
Or selling data to repo people / skip tracers. In fact a few of the larger companies that already exist do that and they share data between clients' ANPR (ALPR) devices on their repo / skip tracer work vehicles. The ACLU published a document about the privacy issues around this in 2013. [0]
I'm actually in the process of building exactly what you're describing and would love to chat. Would you mind shooting me an email? naeem.tee@gmail.com
Many villages/residential areas suffer from speeding and rat running, but getting a local authority to take you seriously or even get the local police to 'visit' the speeders and have a word is hard to make happen.
Community speed watch using ANPR cameras to create an average speed monitored area is HUGE. Even working out people that are using the one way road systems incorrectly helps.
This has huge application across multiple resident associations. To achieve this you need to be able to time synch, know the location of each camera, the shortest 'route' between each camera, and the ability to 'network' each camera.
Where do I invest? Hell I have 16 residents associations that would bite your hands off to get their hands on a cheap traffic profiling system.