Small Towns Fed Up With Drivers Using Their Roads To Avoid Major Traffic

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork)-- It's hard to remember life before GPS. Now, traffic apps not only alert you to back ups on the road in real time, they divert you to faster, alternate routes.

But users may find their diversions detoured by towns that are fed up with all the wayward traffic, CBS2's Dick Brennan reports.

Why sit in a mess to get to the George Washington Bridge when a number of traffic apps could help you circumvent congestion?

"These apps are excellent at taking you off the clogged highways and sending you onto the byways," Robert Sinclair, of AAA, told CBS2.

But these byways are very often residential streets, in towns like Leonia, New Jersey.

"Every day there are hundreds of cars, if not thousands, that use our roads as a cut through to the bridge," Police Chief Thomas Rowe said.

And that's driving residents of this less than 2-square-mile town crazy.

"It can take you 15 minutes to get from one side of Leonia to the other," Maureen Davis said.

Not only that, Rowe said it's also potentially dangerous.

"We have children walking to school. You have vehicles doing 25, 30, 35 on a side street that was not intended for those speeds," he said.

And it's not just Leonia. Residents across the country are complaining of similar situations.  In a statement, Google, which also owns driving app Waze, said "if a road is public, it is available to all drivers."

Sinclair agrees, but says because drivers don't always obey local traffic laws on these alternate routes, towns are taking matters into their own hands.

"We have seen the response of many towns, preventing through traffic, going down some of these residential streets," Sinclair said.

Rowe said he's closed as many as eight roads a morning to non-residents when traffic has been too heavy for his town to handle.

And while Councilwoman Maureen Davis-Havlusch said the barricades have helped, they're just not enough.

"As soon as you put your finger in the dike in one place with traffic, they pop out another place... so we really need assistance from the Port Authority because it's their traffic coming through our town," Davis-Havlusch said.