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Waze Causing Anger Among LA Residents
KindMind writes According to AP, Waze has caused trouble for LA residents by redirecting traffic from Interstate 405 to neighborhood side streets paralleling the interstate. From the article: "When the people whose houses hug the narrow warren of streets paralleling the busiest urban freeway in America began to see bumper-to-bumper traffic crawling by their homes a year or so ago, they were baffled. When word spread that the explosively popular new smartphone app Waze was sending many of those cars through their neighborhood in a quest to shave five minutes off a daily rush-hour commute, they were angry and ready to fight back. They would outsmart the app, some said, by using it to report phony car crashes and traffic jams on their streets that would keep the shortcut-seekers away. Months later, the cars are still there, and the people are still mad."
Don't live next to the freeway if you don't like traffic
Google Maps used to send you down random side streets thinking it would save 3 minutes, which it often didn't (my least favorite was when it took you on a route that ended up requiring you to take an unprotected left through traffic, something that on its own easily ate any time savings and more). I notice they're a bit more conservative on that in the past few years; they only tell me to hop off the freeway and take a surface street when it's really going to save a significant amount of time.
The real solution for this neighborhood, though, is to complain to their local politicians. If the neighborhood isn't intended to be a through route, it's pretty easy to make it unattractive as a through route, e.g. by making some of the streets one-way. That's not uncommon at all in traffic planning.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
They should add a gang shooting feature to waze. I'm sure if people learn that their route has gang shootings they won't take that path ... or maybe they would ;)
I feel like they should have the voice of Elvis as the nav voice for all the ghettos it takes you through.
Problem solved. (takes nap)
That's when the local government needs to slap up a no thru traffic sign, and the local police need to camp out and write tickets as fast as they can until the traffic thins out.
Lobby the city to make it a dead end or stop complaining, those are your two options. It's a public street and it's too bad if you don't like people driving on it.
Our local paper took a slow news day to post "the best shortcuts during heavy traffic" screwing everything up. Now everybody jams on the side roads the second they see tail lights.
This is only such a big problem because L.A.'s westside residents have been opposing sane solutions like toll lanes and trains for decades!
Speed bumps. Waze has done some strange rerouting taking me into the Bay Area. Instead of keeping me on US101 through the admittedly heavy slog by San Jose airport, it wants me to get in a long line of metered traffic to get on 85, then get on the heavily congested 87 freeway and then get in another massive line of metered traffic to rejoin US 101 right at the end of the runway.
I think Waze will improve, but for now, I only depend on it for rerouting around accidents.
App or no app, traffic in cities and suburbs is something that is going to need to be dealt with somehow. Cities like Boston or New York at least have a workable public transit system to keep some cars off the roads. LA is totally different -- it was built around cars and is only now getting a very small set of public transit choices. Buses do nothing when they're stuck in the same traffic everyone else is. Whenever I go to California for work (either northern or southern,) it amazes me how much people put up with to live there. I would go nuts spending 2 hours doing a 10 mile trip each direction every day.
Some trends are encouraging from a traffic perspective, but maybe not from a demographic one. Younger people aren't buying suburban houses and having big families the way they used to, so it's possible cities will become denser like they are in Europe. The big thing that has to stop, especially in mid-size cities, is the suburban sprawl. The ability to expand for miles in every direction directly contributes to messy traffic problems. Urban planners need to look into reclaiming hollowed-out cities and first ring suburbs, and getting people to move back into them.
This is a simple case of knowledge as power.
Telling people they shouldn't use software to avoid freeway traffic is like telling black slaves they can't read because they might learn what it's like to have a life outside the plantation.
Knowledge exists whether or not you want it to and you can't force ignorance.
If someone discovers a way to improve their life in a way that is perfectly legal and legitimate, such as driving down a street in front of your house, you have no right to complain.
I appreciate the frustration of people taking alternative routes right through "their" neighborhood. However, these are public streets, not specifically "theirs". While you could argue tax dollars pay for those streets, ultimately it pays for the entire transportation system. Overloaded freeways are a huge problem - and how many municipalities are expanding (or can expand) the size of these arteries in order to handle the traffic? No one wants to pay for them, but everyone wants to use them. If you want the cars to leave, then vote for more projects in transportation and put your money where your mouth is.
'nuff said.
We have the same problem where I live (spoiler: not LA), and the solution is pretty easy. Traffic furniture (aka concrete obsticles in the road) and anti-traffic flow patterns both work very well. Make it hard to get through your neighborhood (lots of 1 ways and blocked roads) for people trying to parallel the 405 & your traffic problems go away. Of course, work with your city government to make this happen.
If you're in bumper-to-bumper on surface streets, isn't that worse than being backed up on the freeway? All else equal, the freeway has no lights and as long as it's not truly blocked you'll move faster than you would on surface streets.
I have no idea how "Waze" works, but if it's just shunting people onto side streets without informing them of current conditions I'd be inclined to take 405 and just thank them for making it ever so slightly easier.
Really though, LA just needs more lanes and trains. I'm sure at some point these neighborhoods will lobby for (and receive) 4-way stop signs, "no through traffic", speed bumps and perhaps even gates that only allow emergency vehicles and residents to pass. Really though, they just need more lanes.
Eminent domain those house and get some more lanes in.
Probably better to put a new highway in off to one side or another, considering it's LA go with both.
No sir I dont like it.
Depending on which freeway you are on, Waze could be sending you down some of the poorest, most dangerous parts of California. Getting off the freeway on some section of LA is downright dangerous.
Get with your local government to put a "no through traffic" sign and have fines for violating it
The problem is not that Waze is directing traffic to side streets. The problem is that the side streets are more appealing than the highway during rush hour. Waze is only the messenger.
The solution is pretty straightforward: If the community can't improve the accessibility of the highway, it can reduce the appeal of the side streets. The trick is doing so in a manner that does not inconvenience residents during the off-hours. Reducing the speed limit during rush hour, with a traffic camera or cop posted to dole out fines for a week or so, would do the trick.
From TFA:
Why wouldn't it be a problem for those of use not living in Trendville? It was a hell of a problem here in a town much smaller (37k) than either Detroit (681k) or Des Moines (203k) where cars would speed (during non rush hour) down a neighborhood street or pack it bumper to bumper (during rush hour) to cut around a stop light - especially when the elementary school one more street over was letting out and the area was filled with kids walking home. It finally took a kid getting hit (though thankfully not seriously injured) before the city stopped "studying the problem" and got around to blocking one end of the street.
Drivers using residential roads as through traffic routs is a serious and common problem. It's dangerous for residents, particularly children who are on foot in their neighborhood. Through drivers go fast, and cause congestion by directionally over-loading intersections that were designed to handle different traffic loads.
Municipalities will usually alter the roadplan to discourage drivers (Making the alternate route longer, and thust no longer a time saver) And when there's a school involved they will dead-end streets in the area because you can't have kids walking to school, crossing roads with hundreds of cars who's drivers are just trying to get to work faster.
This is a problem even without some trendy app that thinks it's better than a real road planner.
tear up the streets and put in new water mains and sewers, by the time the construction is done waze will have reprogrammed it's options... or there is always public transportation,
"If they have, they've obviously failed. Killeen said her four-mile commute to UCLA, where she teaches a public relations class, can take two hours during rush hour."
It takes her 2 hours to go 4 miles. That's her driving a car at 2 mph for 2 miles. You know what else is faster than that? EVERYTHING. That's slower than walking speed, definitely slower than biking, jogging, rollerblading, skating, skateboarding and anything else I can think of. I would *love* to have only a 4 mile commute in LA's climate. I'd never drive my car to the office again.
Strikes me they should angry at either the city of L.A. or the state of California for not investing in better road infrastructure. Waze is a symptom of overburdened roads, lack of proper infrastructure is the cause.
I'd also be curious to know how many of these folks may have voted against tax increases to fund road infrastructure.
Don't fucking live in LA if you don't want to deal with traffic.
Seems pretty simple.
As long as you accept that a free right turn, followed by a u-turn, followed by another free right turn, is faster than waiting for the light at the intersection.
on-topic: seems to me that the problem is more with the highway not being able to handle the volume of traffic. Sure, you can make it less attractive for people to use the parallel road but that does little more than shift the problem elsewhere. In addition, these measures often hinder the residents themselves and emergency services as well, and depending on the choice of measure, can even increase problems. When they put speed bumps at the intersections in our area, we started to see an increase in structural damages in houses, as buses and trucks late in the evening had no trouble getting over those at normal speed, and just transferred energy from the bump, into the ground, and out to the houses.
I stopped relying on Waze when it had me exit the freeway and then immediately re-enter the freeway just to pass a few cars. I thought, "Thanks, Waze. In order to save 15 seconds I just made several people angry."
... Block off one side of effected streets turning them into cul de sacs. Additionally, put up a sign at the entry of the cul de sac that makes it clear that there is no passage through that neighborhood.
If there is only one way in and out of a given street then people won't use it to pass through.
The real issue in Los Angeles though is that the population density is too high. Their transit system can't handle it.
The easy solution is to make highrise apartment and office buildings illegal through zoning. Grand father existing structures of course... but when new construction happens, make it clear that it cannot exceed a certain height. Do that and the density is capped. And if you keep the density capped then you won't need to build subway systems etc to handle over development.
Appreciate, LA already has water and power issues. Their infrastructure in general is not keeping pace. The city does not have the schools, the water, the power, the roads, the buses, the subways, the airports, etc to handle what it already has. It is failing to meet demand as anyone can tell you that uses LA resources.
Cap the density at what civic resources are currently providing and only increase that cap when all relevant resources can meet the new demand. A trick they like to play is "projecting" resource expansions in the future and uncapping expansion now to make use of that projected expansion. Then they don't invest the money to build what they projected they'd build.
So don't base anything on projections. Base it on what things are now.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...my streets.
We all payed into building streets, why should you have exclusive rights on the ones in your neighborhood? Policies such as those mentioned above make traffic worse not better by allowing 1 and only 1 viable alternative to reaching a destination. I wish my city would do the same for residents of suburbs that adopted such policies. Get caught driving on these roads if you live in that suburb? $200 fine, next time take public transportation.
If it looks for passive movement data, why not create a bunch of accounts and put some old cell phones to good use broadcasting traffic data? Hook them up to wireless, use a VPN if needed to mask the IP, and show "cars" stopped. You could add in accident reports to make it more realistic. Maybe even some VMs running an iPhone simulator to increase the number of spoofed cars. Remember, technology is your friend if used correctly; just don't get any on you...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Kill them dead until they're really, really dead. Then kill them some more just to be sure.
That would be rather inconvenient for the residents themselves, would not it?
Why, yes, this is a great argument to justify selective enforcement of traffic laws too — tell the police to only ticket non-residents. Still feeling good?
Why is the site, that is all up-in-arms about net-neutrality — forcing private corporations to treat all traffic the same — tolerates the exact opposite sentiment, when it comes to traffic on public roads?
Unlike the network cables and electronics, the roads are actually ours — we all pay taxes for their repairs and upkeep — how can it be Ok for mayor and/or town-council of Western Bumfuck to limit traffic and give preference to local residents?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Zoning laws prevent you from doing what you want with your property... They are evil and, obviously, a magnet for graft and other corruption.
Houston, for example, is not any worse without them...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Nuisance Action
I've lived in LA for 14 years after moving from the east coast. Waze describes me as in the top 1% of my state, which bothers me quite a bit. The problem with LA is ..... (wait for it) the city is its own suburb. It always amazed me that my commute to downtown LA (about 65 miles) when I have to go is the same as someone living in say Culver city (10 miles). The problem when you get to the heart of it is a municipality that is unable to expand the traffic grid to match the cities growth, or subsidize mass transit to where it's viable. In new york city, or DC I can get to the city, then fairly easily get around. However in LA getting into the city costs as much, and takes as long as driving. Then when your in the city there is no way to get around as the localized mass transit grid isn't sufficient, and takes forever. Thus LA culture is one where you figure out the best way to drive (on your own) from point a. to point b. Waze is just making it a lot easier.
Eminent domain those house and get some more lanes in.
Probably better to put a new highway in off to one side or another, considering it's LA go with both.
Except expanding highways/roads only makes traffic worse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
The only way to improve traffic flow is to get reduce the number of cars.
Who get's to simply claim a public street as their own? I live on a street. Cars drive down the street. They have every right to. Either move to a gated community or campaign for telecommuting or something. This isn't the fault of waze or any other navigation system. There are simply too many people. they have to go somewhere. They can't all keep fitting down the same pipe. The navigation systems are likely helping traffic on the whole.
no repairs for 15 years. it is your private road.
no people - no problem
Seems a lot of people think that the solution to traffic bottlenecks is to create even more traffic bottlenecks. Good traffic routing is about spreading the load, and that is exactly what Waze is doing. Of course it can only alleviate the symptoms so much, there reaches a point where more (not less, one-way, blocked, etc) roads are necessary. NIMBY solves nothing, and in fact makes the problem worse.
FTFA:
Killeen said her four-mile commute to UCLA, where she teaches a public relations class, can take two hours during rush hour.
>4 miles
>Sunny LA
GET A FUCKING BICYCLE!
--
BMO
Have these people never heard of nails?
My brother and I were actually heading down to the Sunset Strip a couple weeks ago for a concert and my brother decided to try the Waze route. We spent far longer than we would have taking that route, back through the hilltop Hollywood neighborhoods--tight windy roads up and down steep hills, tons of low to no-visibility corners, single-lane available width a lot of the way. Seriously dangerous, particularly since it was at night and was raining hard.
Yeah, never again.
Anyone in the area with a Waze account has the ability to modify the map. There are a few things you can try... Make sure the road is the lowest level of road below highway. Heck make it a dirt road; still routable but Waze should skip it. Make the turn-off red to disable it. Of course other people might complain and want it back on, but if you have active moderators in the area they should know why it's off. Waze is doing what it's supposed to do. It notices a faster route and directs people to it. Any GPS app would have the same problem. As stated above, if you don't like it, get the city to change the road.
-AlPhAbEt
What are you talking about? There are plenty of sidewalks everywhere, I use them all the time all over town. Where the sidewalk sucks there's always a nearby alternative, and for 4 hours a day you bet your ass I'd look pretty damn hard.
I hear similar claims from people who think the public transit still sucks. Really they can do it, they're just incredibly lazy.
One of the reasons I live where I do is because I'm close to work, about 4 miles away. Lets me bike in. That way I don't have to deal with the expense and clusterfuck that is parking on a big campus. 4 miles is a very easy, short, ride so it is no problem. You don't need to change or anything, you don't work up a sweat.
I agree - there's a place in my city where they cut a four-way intersection in half diagonally, so it doesn't go straight-through anywhere! Traffic is pretty low on that road, because you can't go anywhere useful on it without a couple extra inconvenient turns.
Rich people don't live on streets adjoining the freeway even in California.
make some free space
"Waze has caused trouble for LA residents by redirecting traffic from Interstate 405 to neighborhood side streets paralleling the interstate. "
Exactly, that is why I use Waze, so when the highways get backed up, I can go around them on the surface streets!
If you can't take the traffic, move to the suburbs!
Software could rate limit side-road detours, giving priority to (1) law-abiding drivers who follow speed limit regulations and come to a full-stop at stop signs or (2) drivers who pay a premium for the application or (3) click on high-value advertising. They could (4) abstain from sending drivers onto side-road detours during the specific times and areas that children are travelling to/from school (even (5) detecting this by use of commonly available cellphones for school-age children). Traffic that's at a complete standstill might be (6) targeted for high-value advertising, or even (7) offer a detour for a fee. Detours could be prioritized based on carbon or other pollution emissions - depending on whether one prefers (8) to incentivize low-carbon vehicles or (9) temporarily reduce emissions on those "spare the air days" by getting high-pollution vehicles to their destination more quickly.
If Google/Waze failed to create these modifications, they could be imposed by local or state legislation, and/or agreed to by a standards working group to encourage universal compliance. Legislators could even use "virtual HOT lanes" as funding sources, raising "sorely needed funding for high speed rail" or "community improvement projects."
Now who's being evil?
The new HOT (High Occupancy or Toll) lanes are variable priced. They show you how much on a big
sign seconds before you have to decide to take HOT lanes or not. They up the price as it gets
more congested to try and keep things flowing. I'm not sure how ethical that is.
termitators are comingg!
is going to reveal Sony's role in this. Despicable.
Is this "LA" a reference to Los Angeles? In California? Since 2010, Los Angeles freeways *have* been widened to the tune of many $B and years of traffic delays. Opposition and complaints were simply ignored. Some surface streets have been widened in a major way (e.g. Santa Monica Blvd.) and most other major surface arteries are being repaved and "optimized." Ditto about opposition and complaints. Traffic control & signalling has been vastly expanded -- just look at the level of detail available on Google Traffic now vs. 2 years ago. And just try (like my very politically connected and organized neighborhood did) to cut down on local traffic -- all you'll get is city administration's sympathy, but then they add that the roads must roll and we should actually expect our local traffic to increase significantly.
So shut the fuck up! Or don't you use your cars outside your neighbourhood.
Perhaps they don't realize that the users' reports are weighted - newbies don't have as much pull as veteran users of the app who have proven their ranking over time. Notice, for example, that if you pass a reported "accident" or "police reported" location Waze often asks you to verify if it is there or not. This is all part of a complex algorithm used internally to not only determine their heuristics for routing, but to validate and filter out bogus reports. It is very simple to find and reduce the weight of those who constantly abuse the system. It would be trivial for the developers to determine those devices/users that are constantly posting from the exact same location and bury their reports after a while even if this isn't part of their current algorithm. A.I. > Human Intelligence
Better Idea: Lobby Congress to nuke LA from orbit.
Los Angeles is full. No more building permits.
If it was a water or sewer system, the health department would slap a moratorium on permits. Transportation is just another utility. It's all used up. No more.
Have gnu, will travel.
Any proposed solution is moot. Climate change is going to push all these people inland soon, so they'll have another chance to decide where to live and how traffic will affect them. We either believe it, or we don't. Right?
sig: sauer
I suspect Waze is routing people off the 405, through a neighborhood, and then back onto the 405 (hence a few minutes savings for their commutes). The more people that do this trick, the more the traffic jams up at that entrance ramp, hence contributing to the problem which causes Waze to route more traffic through the neighborhood. BTW: I use Waze daily, but don't live in California.
This city was built in mind to have a car, so there's no way to solve the problem with wider streets. Other megacities have solved this problem with better public transportation.
Most of the road-work money comes from gasoline taxes? Not in America, recently, given the sweet $65 billion quite probably illegally transfered from the general fund to keep the (purportedely gas-tax supported) Highway Trust Fund solvent:
https://www.enotrans.org/store...
Just improve the roads and expand the amount of lanes! Huh? huh?
Oops, I forgot I live in the USA where logical thought is forbidden ;-)
When the people whose houses hug the narrow warren of streets paralleling the busiest urban freeway in America began to see bumper-to-bumper traffic crawling by their homes a year or so ago, they were baffled.
Baffled? Really? You never expected people driving on a highway RIGHT NEXT TO YOUR EMPTY ROAD to not figure out that maybe that way might be faster?
"The traffic is unbearable now. You can't even walk your dog,"
Why would street traffic affect walking your dog?
Killeen said her four-mile commute to UCLA, where she teaches a public relations class, can take two hours during rush hour.
Wait, so people are diverting onto streets that average two miles per hour? Are the highways only averaging one mile per hour?
The streets on the west side are no longer a secret for locals, and people are angry,"
PUBLIC streets aren't suppose to be a 'secret'. Duh.
Too many people trying to use too little land in a very stupid fashion.
Mathematically, if you keep increasing the numbers of people, you have gridlock and war over territory (that's what this is). Happens with deer, wolves, oak trees, bacteria, and hydrogen floating in interstellar space trying to form stars.
You control your numbers, or nature steps in and does it the only other way - the four horsemen, singly or in combinations. This will be solved with War - by another name. Laws, road blockages, software mandates, gates, lasers, STD spikes, moats, drawbridges, car-GPS tracking... they'll go to war, save their patches of land, and make the problem worse somewhere else, which will in turn push back.
In this case, the problem is racism, conservatism (cars uber alles), and a terrible transportation system that insists on moving people around in the own private houses on wheels because reasons. There is a numerical limit on the number of boxes moving around on ribbons at the same time and LA exceeded that limit long ago.
PS You don't own your neighborhood streets. That what "street" means. Not that it will stop them from "owning" them anyway.
all the people who complained about this need to fuck off since its a public road and anyone should be able to drive on it and im alo almost sure that you arent allowed to phone in fake car crashes and at this point waze probably doesnt even accept them anymore from that area
They made buses free in Pittsburgh some years back. Just for a short period of time, as a special thing to try out. The result was a large number of people who were, shall we say, youthful and unemployed, taking to the buses like fleas to a dog. Massive problems with muggings, robbery, vandalism, and worse. People didn't feel safe. Pretty much killed busing for all the law abiding citizens trying to get to work or out to shop.
It was just for a short period of time. Like a day or two. A special event.
That was decades ago. In all this time, I haven't heard of anyone trying it again.
Now that they know it is a shortcut/bypass, you will never be rid of them.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Dunno about where you live but for me the closer you live to the downtown metro area, the more expensive it becomes.
So to the poster that stated we should just " Dump our cars because they make us fat ", I'll consider it when my employer starts paying me enough to afford the million + dollar condos that are the new norm in the downtown area.
Most commute because we HAVE to, not because two hours of traffic one way is fun :/
As usual, someone points out your flaws, and you fly off the handle. And then you just restate the already, disproven theory again, as if we didn't hear you the first fucking time. Look guy, your solution is shitty. It's already been tried. That's what made the suburban sprawl we're bitching about now but you somehow think you're smarter than all of the other REAL engineers who study this day in and day out. You're pathetic, Karma, and we the /. community are tired of hearing your derp.
Oh and you know what you are going to allow me to do? Call you a fucking cunt, ya cunt. You don't get to dictate what I do or do not type. If it were possible, I would have already deleted your account so we wouldn't have to hear your drivel.
We obviously know you're a blowhard know-it-all cock smoker and we don't fucking like you. Go away!
install physical obstacles such as chicanes and speed humps to slow traffic down. These are surface streets, so getting planning clearance should be a local issue. Once the permanent slowdowns are in place, the app should soon catch up and stop directing traffic from the interstate to roads that should be fucking slower anyway!
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Don't live next to the freeway if you don't like traffic
Sometimes that is the only place to live. Gating a community is not a better option either.
The solutions I have seen in other places include:
- narrowing the intersections to reduce speed of traffic
- making one way streets that locals know how to use, but end up diverting traffic back onto the main arteries.
- introducing speed bumps to slow traffic
- lowering speed limit on these secondary roads
- blocking part of the street with a park, to force traffic to have make more detours
- adding public transport lanes, while sacrificing car traffic lanes.
The solution will depend on the exact location and will probably end up being a hybrid
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It has nothing to do with wealth.
A quiet, kid-friendly neighbourhood street becomes literally a meat grinder.
I have lived twice near such streets. Once - juat as the street was transitioning from the "quiet, kid-friendly" to "meat grinder". Two kids were killed by speeding cars. Road bumps had only limited (and largely negative) effect: an idiot crashes his car on the road bump, traffic jam forms on both sides of the street and the whole city quarter is effectively blocked: no car can get in or get out.
The final solution community found was to cut the one "through" street in the middle, making out of it two dead-end streets.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
They haven't adjusted the tax in twenty years. Personal "car" driving and fuel use has actually gone down a bit after 2008 and because cars are more efficient now. They haven't made that lost money up, let alone covered for inflation of materials and labor.
Personal driving subsidizes commercial traffic to attract business, which has been more out of balance after 2008 than before.
As someone who drove the 405 and these streets that are being discussed, "these" people that live on these streets must be high. This happens periodically in LA, especially around the 405 and always seemed to be cyclical. Some days the side streets would be better than others but the bottom line is the 405 (and the 10, 101, 110, 5 to name a few others) is basically useless at this point. Short of making it about 20-25 lanes across, nothing will alleviate the traffic on or near the 405 (ok - maybe flying cars :0 )
Have the city install road blocks to make traffic take a longer route. Europe has already figured that one out. (Makes it very difficult for tourists to figure out how to get somewhere).
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
It's an "established" neighborhood that is probably a bit above my social class. My cross-street had the "shortcut" problem so the voters pressured the city to do the ultimate "dick move" to the short-cutters. 4 lanes became 2 lanes + bike lane on each side, and they added stop signs at every other cross street.
It went from "oh lets avoid traffic" to "why bother?"
As someone then living in Studio City but working in Santa Monica, we all knew how to use the residential streets to get around blockages of the 405. Mulholland (which is very much residential) to Laurel Canyon, for example. We told each other about them. I personally knew five or six alternates.
This may be spreading the word among people who don't try things on their own, but it's been a problem for the residents for many years. They do all sorts of things, from speed bumps to parking their cars in the narrowest (legal) places possible to slow down traffic. We would still use these routes.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I don't know about you, but I don't need to travel a route more than a couple of times before I know it ; and for working out alternatives, I've got these things called "eyes" and "memory" for "reading" things called "road signs" which are cunningly positioned to direct people how to get from point 'A' (here) to point 'B' (somewhere else). I don't see any need to slavishly follow the directions of some application on my phone, or an appliance on my dashboard.
If I'm in a strange city - say I'm there for one day, for work, or 3 days as part of a vacation, then frankly it is easier to use a taxi than to fuck around hiring a car.
It's a solution in search of a problem. And I bet the problem it's solving is "how to expose adverts to users".
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"