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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 28 2017, @04:40AM
Quick reality check:
It's quite possible in most large (and even medium) cities to do a lot of moving around with mass transit. I've lived in multiple cities in the USA that had rail, light rail, buses and so on (depending on local geographic realities).
So, if you have lots of time, not much to move around, and you only want to be in your local conurbation, you're probably golden.
However, the USA is a large place, with lots (and lots, and lots) of miles between different places. Think of all the times you've heard someone describe Texas as being big - now remember that the USA is bigger than several Texases! Even if you don't count Texas!
Wow, yeah, that's kind of big.
It also turns out that a lot of people live outside the cities where they work for all sorts of reasons. We can piss and moan about suburbs, and white flight, and ribbon development, and all that stuff together, but it doesn't change the facts on the ground; there are a lot of people who want to move from widely dispersed locations to and from centralised locations on a daily basis. Establishing mass transit for all those cases is, in computer parlance, a highly nontrivial problem. More so once you include the economics.
If you're a student of the history of transport, you may be aware that the UK closed down a lot of local train lines that were mostly running empty at simply eye-watering costs, quite a while back. It had been a sort of late victorian, post-victorian ideal of country improvement to build all these railways, and connect the country. This turns out to have been a nice ambition, but impractical in execution. Now bear in mind that the UK is, compared to the USA, insanely densely populated. And it wasn't worth it there. And isn't today. Now expand that case to the USA, and you can see how things like park-n-ride facilities are an attempt to meet that problem halfway.
Of course, they're still slow, inconvenient and expensive, but if they happen to meet your needs, and schedule, and you don't mind your car being in a car thief's paradise all day, cool. You've just received a subsidy (because most of these are money losers, so the taxpayer is picking up your bennies).
Now there are some plans afoot. A positive cacophany of plans involving platooning ropeway recumbent subway vacuums (unfold as appropriate) but the funny thing is that they keep costing insane amounts for limited benefits, and even so the solutions are usually unpopular. I was trying to help someone find an alternative for their long commute, back in the days of $4+/gallon fuel, and it turned out at the time that the best available alternative would be slower, less flexible, and cost more until the price rose to about $6/gallon.
And this is with substantial government subsidies already in place for the alternative. Wow.
So explain to us all again, because maybe we just missed it, precisely which alternative will be fiscally and logistically justifiable, and precisely why? Because I'd love to take mass transit from unincorporated coastal Oregon to unincorporated coastal Florida, in a realistic timespan, but it's not an option right now.
Any time you're ready. I'll be taking notes.