Traffic Safety Town Hall - impact of WAZE on our Palmetto Bay Community

Please attend and be part of the discussion relating to traffic safety in Palmetto Bay. We expect to be rolling our new OT/ZERO tolerance traffic safety initiatives. I am co-hosting this meeting with Council Member David Singer.  The meeting will be held Monday, March 12, 2018, beginning at 7:00 PM (CLICK HERE to view the official village notice). Please accept our invitation to participate. 

Our Village Police Commander, Major Gadyaces Serralta, provided an interesting update at the March regular village council meeting (March 5, 2018) in discussing an area of special traffic enforcement. Major Serralta noted that most of an area's offenders were driving with a WAZE app open.  I am posting here an article that makes more than a few "interesting points" about WAZE:

Even though the app makes the route quicker for the user, that’s only in relation to other drivers not using the app, not to their previous drives. Now, because everyone is using the app, everyone’s drive-times are longer compared to the past. “These algorithms are not meant to improve traffic, they’re meant to steer motorists to their fastest path,” he says. “They will give hundreds of people the shortest paths, but they won’t compute for the consequences of those shortest paths.”

See: For the Good of Society — and Traffic! — Delete Your Map App, by Rick Paulas, NYMag.com, December 11, 2017

This is recommended reading about something that our Palmetto Bay residents are severely impacted by, noting that:

All that extra traffic down previously empty streets has created an odd situation in which cities are constantly playing defense against the algorithms.

“Typically, the city or county, depending on their laws, doesn’t have a way to fight this,” says Bayen, “other than by doing infrastructure upgrades.”

(CLICK HERE) To view the grid report of how many traffic citations (527) were issued in Palmetto Bay during the month of January 2018.  We maintain monthly reports online.

We continue to work for solutions and we continue to address ongoing issues.  The areas of concern shift from one area to anther, as Mayor Serralta advises: "The Village Policing Unit takes traffic enforcement very seriously however we do not always know where the violations have shifted to.  Our village administration/Law Enforcement does depend on our residents and elected officials to let us know if they feel there is an area that we need to address or in some cases re-address."

So please join us and provide an update to us and our police on your area(s) of concern.

Thank you,

Eugene Flinn, Mayor