A Town Turns the Tables on Traffic Apps

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To the Editor:

Re “Choked by App-Driven Traffic, a Community Closes Its Roads” (front page, Dec. 25):

Your article about commuters who, using traffic apps, detour from highways onto town roads to avoid traffic bottlenecks reports that one town, Leonia, N.J., is banning nonresidents from its streets.

Whether towns have the authority to do that is important, especially since there is a simple solution that doesn’t involve discrimination against nonresidents. Small towns can lower speed limits or install stop signs to make their roads unattractive to outsiders. But that would involve some inconvenience to residents.

Usually in life you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. This is an example. If the people of Leonia want to make their roads less inviting to commuters, they will have to make some sacrifices of their own. The holiday season is a good time to realize that we are all in this together, always.

MICHAEL DAVIS, NEW YORK

To the Editor:

Traffic nightmares in small towns aren’t the only issue with Waze and other traffic apps. This past summer, we were relying on Waze to get us to a Sicilian mountain town for lunch. At first we didn’t mind the unpaved back roads. But then the app sent us up a very steep road that just ended with a cliff in front of us, and a long drop on the right.

The thing was, it wasn’t a road. It was a driveway. When the owner of the home came out, she looked at us in exasperation, threw up her hands and exclaimed, “Waze!” She signaled to us to back into the garage, do a hairpin turn down the driveway and try not to hit the tomatoes drying in the sun — taking up half the driveway — in our manual-transmission station wagon. She didn’t stick around to see what happened next.

I’m a very good driver, but the rental was soon scratched pretty badly on the side from a run-in with the garage wall, and the bumper was damaged hitting one of the boulders protecting the cliff on that hairpin turn. We made it to lunch alive and unharmed, but that was the last time we will ever use Waze instead of relying on old-fashioned street signs to “Centro.”

VICTORIA HARMON, NEW YORK