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[...] In mid-January, the borough’s police force will close 60 streets to all drivers aside from residents and people employed in the borough during the morning and afternoon rush periods, effectively taking most of the town out of circulation for the popular traffic apps — and for everyone else, for that matter.
[...] While a number of communities have devised strategies like turn restrictions and speed humps that affect all motorists, Leonia’s move may be the most extreme response.
[...] Borough officials say their measure is legal, although it may yet get tested in court. Some traffic engineers and elected officials elsewhere say the move may set a precedent that could encourage towns to summarily restrict public access to outsiders.
Source: Navigation Apps Are Turning Quiet Neighborhoods Into Traffic Nightmares
Also: New Jersey town will close streets to fight navigation app traffic
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday December 27 2017, @02:48AM (2 children)
The answer probably is that there are good - rich areas where taxes built good roads - and poor bad ones. Similar to schools.
Honestly, I doubt this. Money isn't a guarantee of competence. Places with local governments with more money have more resources to take advantage of, true, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to do a better job with traffic engineering. Just look at the NJ town in this article: that's not a poor neighborhood at all. But they're obviously too stupid to plan their roads well. I used to live in northern NJ, in and among many very wealthy towns, with very high home values and utterly absurd property tax rates, and the roads there were a complete fucking disaster. They were paved well enough (and repaved because they got torn up every winter by the snow plows), but the layouts were utterly stupid, and there wasn't any apparent effort to fix that. Getting from town to town almost always meant driving on little 2-lane (1 each side) roads, and passing people on the shoulder when they were turning left, and frequently using weird little short cuts because there simply was no rational planning to these roads at all. There was absolutely no shortage of money: the local schools had absurdly high budgets and could afford very expensive football fields, and the local cops got ridiculously generous pay and pensions and early retirements.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday December 28 2017, @08:09AM (1 child)
In places like New Jersey, which was settled well before the advent of motor vehicles, a good many roads were originally horsepaths. Most of those designed for motor vehicles were originally built in rural areas where no more than a single lane in each direction was needed. Most of those areas of course can no longer be considered rural by an stretch. Many roads have been reengineered to deal with more traffic after the fact, which is far less optimal than designing roads at the start to deal with a lot of traffic. The end result is what they have, a few major arteries fed by a mismash of local roads of all sorts, where any attempts at "rational" planning is merely an attempt to incorporate and deal with what was already there.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday December 28 2017, @03:39PM
Yes, but many of these places are also very wealthy with huge tax bases, so they have no real excuse for not methodically exercising eminent domain and cleaning up the mess and putting in better highways.