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Waze and Other Traffic Dodging Apps Prompt Cities To Game the Algorithms (usatoday.com)
KindMind writes: USA today reports that Waze and others are causing traffic planners to try to figure out how to gain control back. From the article: "While traffic savvy GPS apps like Waze and Google Maps have provided users a way to get around traffic, it has caused massive headaches for city planners. With highways frequently congested, navigation apps like Google Maps and Waze started telling drivers to hop off the freeway at Fremont's Mission Boulevard, cut through residential streets and then hop back on the highway where things were clearer -- much to the distress of the people who lived there. 'The commuters didn't live or work in Fremont and didn't care about our residential neighborhoods,' said Noe Veloso, Fremont's principal transportation engineer. Fremont instituted commute-hour turn restrictions on the most heavily used residential cut-through routes. The city also partnered with Waze through its Connected Citizens Program in order to share data and information, such as the turn restrictions, so that the app takes them into account. The result has been effective, but Veloso is worried the changes may simply reroute commuters into other neighborhoods."
God forbid that someone gets off a freeway and discovers a local establishment while passing through.
Oh, you mean we're just supposed to sit in gridlock instead? Our highways have been an inadequate crumbling mess for decades. The proper response here is to fix them, not gripe that there's an inadequate workaround.
Yeah Waze works real good. I laugh as I see Waze users, I know they are using Waze because they are sitting in traffic on a side street that is usually empty because of everyone using Waze. Cracks me up everytime... Bummer for the people that live on that street though.
Crowd sourcing is not always a good idea
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Or, you know, politicians could spend the gas tax funds to improve the freeways and stop pissing them away on mass transit buses that have a 15% utilization rate...
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Are the roads paid for by public taxes? They're public roads. I used to do this all the time with the old paper maps. Looks like a road stoppage? Find a parallel city or state road. Follow the speed limits and other rules of the road and you're legally allowed to drive on them.
Want a gated community with private roads? Pay to live in one.
but Veloso is worried the changes may simply reroute commuters into other neighborhoods.
Rerouting traffic to the best available route is a feature, not a bug. Seriously, it's a feature. Don't mess with it.
If you really don't want people cutting through neighborhoods during rush hour, then put up temporary traffic-flow restrictions in ALL neighborhoods during those hours and make sure Waze, Google, etc. know about them.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This is a bandaid on the much deeper problem. Inadequate highway infrastructure. Fix the root cause, not the symptom.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I know how people don't like other people driving through "their" neighborhoods, but unless it's a private road, it's a public road. They have as much right to drive there as you do.
Q: How does water get where it's going?
A: Any way it has to.
Commuters and drivers are like water. Put up a barrier and the "water" will adapt, and rather faster than a creaky bureaucracy can keep up.
When a freeway is congested, good old-fashioned Supply & Demand says it's because the price is below market equilibrium. That's easy to fix, and as a bonus it provides a revenue source to pay for freeways that's less regressive than the sales tax.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
How they dare! City mayors must send them back to the traffic jams where they belong!
The real root of the problem is that people are either unwilling or unable to live within a short distance to their workplace. Many large cities were not designed to handle the volume of commuters that we have had for at least 20 years. People live in the suburbs (for a variety of reasons; some due to economics, others due to a desire to live in areas with lower population density), and commute to the city centers to work. This was okay when suburban sprawl was not as extreme as it is now. In the Bay Area, people can't afford to live close to work due to the insane real estate market. And they don't want to live in shoebox apartments, either.
The problem can only be solved by reducing the need for people to commute. There are a lot of ways to do this:
1. Encourage employees to work remotely where possible.
2. Decrease the cost of living in the city center or areas close to work.
3. Provide financial incentives for employees to live near their job site.
4. Allow more flexible working hours so that traffic volume can be distributed over a longer period of time.
5. Self-driving cars have the potential to reduce accidents and increase traffic flow efficiency.
Notice I did not include public transit. Public transit is only good for people who already live sufficiently close or do not need the flexibility of traveling by car. In Los Angeles, public transit is a complete joke. To commute from a suburb to downtown can take over 90 minutes, whereas driving by car--even in traffic--is at least 30 minutes faster, simply because train frequencies and network densities are too low. Sure, it's great if you only need to travel two or three stations and the trains run every five minutes...but for the vast majority of commuters this is not realistic. Commuters want and need to drive cars.
Tired of trendy digital apps directing traffic into your part of a town or city?
Consider a lot of speed bumps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... with a maximum height that your city or state allows.
A complex roundabout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... as the entry point from the highway.
Use local police to ensure no drugs or cash is been transported into your community.
Searches, K9 alerts, cash confiscations will soon make any driver turn off their trendy digital app and stay on the freeway.
Got a courthouse? Jail? Government building? Ask drivers why they are slowing down and photographing inmates or police. A 10 or 20 min chat down about rights will add to their travel time.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
As an expat who has lived all over the planet, the best organized cities make it really hard to drive *through* neighborhoods by which a neighborhood is maybe one 8x8 block region divided from other similar neighborhoods by a main artery road.
Germany is perhaps the best at this city planning skill. One learns fast to never try to drive *through* such a neighorhood block because you will go mad. Dead end obstacles, trees planted in the middle of the road that you must slooooow down for, super narrow roads (despite wide sidewalks and ample parking), and raised platforms at crosswalks(think of a 5 yard thick speed bump) make going around them the only sensible choice.
They do it because they believe if cars are going fast enough to kill children in small neighborhoods, it is a street design problem so they are often solving high traffic rates by intentionally making it impossible to drive fast with the above car thwarting techniques. Side effect is that waze is moot here and neighborhoods all remain quiet and safe.
Also makes it so they have no police enforcing speed limits in such neighborhoods. The streets are made super narrow and convoluted exactly to the degree necessary to keep you at or below the intended speed limit. The attitude is also something like "If you dont like it, then get on public transit" , which by the way is also fantastic in Germany.
Traffic and speeding are both just engineering problems waiting to be fixed if you see it clearly.
it's selfish people who don't use mass transit
If you live in a city that doesn't run its buses from 8:45 PM to 5:45 AM (source), and you're given hours at night, you need a car in order not to have to spend the majority of your paycheck on a taxi or lose your job. If you live in a city that doesn't run its buses on Sundays, and you're given hours on Sunday, you need a car in order not to have to spend the majority of your paycheck on a taxi or lose your job.
and idiots living one hour away from work that are the problem.
A lot of jobs don't pay enough to rent a place to live closer to work. How are people "idiots" for taking advantage of a sharp gradient in annual housing costs? Perhaps the real "idiots" serve on the city's zoning board that created this situation.
Speed bumps are not the answer because they also impede emergency first responders.
Easiest way to get control back to the traffic planners would be to provide waze with highly dynamic information where traffic planners would like to send the cars to to minimize congestion. And if traffic planners would like them to be stuuck in a traffic jam they should look up their job description or for other jobs.
bickerdyke
where there aren't any HOAs/housewives that can take time out of their day to lobby city councils. It's amazing the difference in public service between well-to-do neighborhoods and the poor ones.
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So town planners are mad that people avoid sitting in traffic and want to find a way to force people to sit in traffic? I didn't realize that generating traffic jams was the actual goal of the transportation people.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This is the approach here; wide enough to catch cars, but so wide that emergency vehicles like ambulances and fire engines aren't inconvenienced.
Just one more step towards war lord neighborhood checkpoints to see if you belong there and if not turn around... is this Africa or America you decide where you want this to lead.
How come every major new technical commercial venture we talk about seems to crap all over a lot of people in some way?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
This is the approach here; wide enough to catch cars, but so wide that emergency vehicles like ambulances and fire engines aren't inconvenienced.
Police cruisers are both cars and emergency vehicles.
Charge for crossing certain points during peak hours, give locals a transponder to wave the fee. It's basic supply and demand.
Yeah, this story was reported more than a year ago.
It has been learned that nearly all the traffic jams in the United States are caused by only one driver. Her name is Maude Jones and she's a very active octogenarian. She's been driving since before God was born and she covers a lot of miles, a real surprise since she never goes over 40 mph. Though she's never been in an accident, authorities say she's caused thousands of them.
Personally I think that maybe every city and town has a Maude (or several). She'd have to be Santa Claus to cover the whole country in one day.
Seriously, if the traffic engineers AND politicians would just do their jobs right, traffic would flow 100% better than it does now. Speaking as someone who has driven nearly two million miles, I've seen it all - and it's ugly out there. Roads, highways, intersections, etc are so poorly designed in some places that I just scratch my head and wonder wtf were they thinking.
Subdivisions have been built with no thought as to the increased traffic they produce. Hospitals are built with no thought given to traffic or parking. With businesses and strip malls all over the place our roads have become shopping aisles (think what it's like with shopping carts inside a big-box store). Schools are sometimes located in places where the traffic is already bad. Near where I live are two HUGE high schools that are only five miles apart and empty onto the same two-lane road. It's a nightmare when school lets out in the afternoon. I don't go near them when school starts in the morning.
There is hope though. Rumor has it that Maude is retiring from driving real soon.
I happen to live exactly within the affected neighborhood. Last week we had the first of what we're calling "Car-Magedon" occur here. Cal Trans in their infinite lack of wisdom chose to fix a large pot-hole in the 680 Freeway right as rush hour was starting block 2 of 4 lanes that leaves the Silicon Valley. This is the major artery that everyone is talking about in the article. Anyway - traffic was SO BAD that it took me 15 minutes to move 5 houses from the corner to get into my driveway. I snuck in to the traffic having luckily met up with my wife who had been waiting on our street for 45 minutes inching her way to our house - she let me cut in front of her! We had a linear parking lot in front of our house for around 4 hours.
As it goes now - we are seeing mile long lines queueing up to get on the 680 before it goes through the hills at the last couple of on-ramps. That is a nightly occurrence.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
take care of the traffic and this won't be a problem. Fix the jobs situation so people don't need to drive that far, fix the roads so they can handle the traffic, fix the economy so we're not all on the road at the same time.
Trying to "game" the traffic apps is like sweeping the dirt under the rug it doesn't help. It just hids.
Just another second banana
You had no problems letting me pay for it so you're going to have to deal with me using it.
We'd build more capacity. Which in California now is about as likely as building more housing, building more water storage capacity, NOT building a stupid waste of money called High Speed [sic] Rail ...
I basically keep reading Waze as "wah-zay"... Is that how it's supposed to be pronounced?
Yeah. Whacko land.
TLDR: stay off the PUBLIC roads because there is TRAFFIC
Track down All of the aggressive drivers, revoke their licenses (also confiscate and sell their cars if they insist on driving anyway), and maybe give them bus passes.
This should accomplish two useful things:
Greatly reduce the amount of traffic (if they are zealous enough, this would eliminate the vast majority of the traffic).
The traffic which remains would flow much better: driving a sensible speed in congestion, not tailgating, not cutting each other off, not using shoulders and exit/entrance lanes to pass, and maybe even not creating so many wrecks.
FIX THE DAMM CONGESTION! Traffic is like water, it flows. It either flows in the channel you provide for it, or it overruns its banks and floods into neighborhoods. Its amazing that traffic engineers could possibly be this dumb.
and no 'traffic engineers"?
In traffic engineering, traffic system can be calculated for optimized traffic flow. Clearly, there hasn't been any engineer to continue upgrade the system as the existing system is unable to keep up with the capacity. Waze and other traffic apps are just fixing their problem for them. If they get a few engineers, they can at least find alternatives to maximize traffic flow before considering infrastructure upgrades.
Just a few examples, including increasing the green light time for peak traffic into city, recommending specific route for low traffic, shifting lanes, changing intersection phasing (priority warning for drivers required), redirect city traffic permanently (not recommended but feasible depend on traffic).
How is solving traffic as a global optimization problem a bad thing? If people don't like it, they should go live in a cul-de-sac.
I take instructions Waz gives me with a grain of salt these days, because something tricky it's telling you to do might give you an extra MINUTE vs. just stating on the highway... also Wze traffic understanding is inherently a little delayed. So now when I think about Waze detours I look carefully at what ahead is triggering going around - if it's an accident more than 30 minutes old, that's probably gone and it will be better to stay on. If rush hour is winding down, the predictions of heavy traffic may evaporate. Conversely, If rush hour had just started the rosy prediction about how awesome the freeway will be is probably wrong.
Also anymore if I do decide to take the Waze side street detour, I take a side street parallel to the one Waze suggests - because after all Waze is sending a lot of people down that street and increasing traffic more than it knows!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
680 traffic is a nightmare. The governments at state and local levels are corrupt. There are so many solutions including the zipper or heck add more freeways. It's so funny that California is the populous state, but the infrastructure is so inadequate. I applaud Googe and Waze (owned by Google now) for bringing more attention to the root of the problem. The infrastructure needs further investment. Where are the property tax dollars being used? We don't need a high speed rail system from LA to SF that will take 20 to 30 years to build. We need more advanced highways and road, faster adoption of self driving technologies (especially on highways), less bureaucracy and putting people first.
Regarding "logical north/south" in Silicon Valley":
- Much of the pacific coast of California is not north-south, but northwest-southeast, making "north-south" major highways about 45 degrees off from the nominal direction.
- In addition, in the area around Silicon Valley (especially the southern part of San Francisco Bay) there is an additional rotation due to the arrangement of faults and the resulting layout of the bay, peninsula, and surrounding mountains (or "big hills" if you don't count them as mountains unless they're snowcapped year around).
So, in and around Silicon Valley, many "north-south" highways actually run almost exactly east-west.
It seems appropriate that, in this part of California, the roads lean about 90 degrees to the left. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Perhaps municipalities should address the needs rather than game the system.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I live and have lived in a neighborhood that people use as a shortcut around a busy, traffic-light controlled intersection. They are driving through a residential area with a posted speed limit of 25mph. The people trying to bypass the intersection will drive as fast as 50mph (more typically at 40mph). Again, the posted speed limit is 25mph and it's a RESIDENTIAL AREA.
The neighborhoods have no sidewalks so people walk in the street near the edge. There are children riding bicycles in the street and people walking their dogs or just out walking.
The point is, if you're going to bypass a slowdown or a backup and you choose to exit and go through a residential area, please respect the speed limit. Recognize you're in a residential area and be respectful and courteous and mindful for the safety of the people who live there.
I suspect the hazard of people driving at highway speeds through residential areas is one of the concerns of city planners.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
On ramp metering worked so well to smooth out freeway traffic, local governments have learned from that lesson and will begin implementing off ramp metering. When traffic on local roads starts to become congested, signal lights on the freeway off ramps can be used to meter the flow into that area. When asked how this scheme would affect freeway congestion, local governments took a cue from the response given when on ramp metering was installed and replied, "Not our problem."
Joking aside, local and freeway traffic planners have been working at odds for far too long. Local communities have lobbied for far too many freeway on/off ramps. Often to divert what should be local traffic onto a nearby freeway for a mile or two in order to avoid building or upgrading arterials through their communities. Perhaps it's time to close off some of these redundant ramps, making it more difficult for drivers to just hop on and off the freeway. And then get municipalities to build adequate local roads that can carry traffic between these more distant ramps and destinations. An added benefit of fewer on/off ramps is a reduction in merging congestion and improvement in traffic flow on the freeway. So less people will be motivated to cut through town.
Have gnu, will travel.
"God forbid that someone gets off a freeway and discovers a local establishment while passing through."
I live in a neighborhood affected by this: there is a narrow road connecting our town to the next town over, that gives commuters a handy shortcut. This road runs through the middle of our town, past three schools and a kindergarten. Commuters - in their blind rush to get from A to B - are not interested in stopping at a local restaurant. They're interested in driving as fast as possible through town, maybe taking a couple of kids along as hood ornaments.
We tried to just close the segment of the road connecting us to the next town, even though this would inconvenience local residents. An administrative court denied this, even though it's a town road, paid for by town funds. So we dropped the speed limit to 20mph, and spent too much money installing obstructions and speed bumps to physically enforce the new speed limit. Whiz through at 40mph, and your suspension will now punch a hole in your roof.
The fact that a road is a "public" road does not make it suitable for long-distance commuters. Really, there ought to be a simple, legal way to restrict local roads to local traffic. It shouldn't be necessary for neighborhoods like ours to spend millions just to keep our local roads from being abused as substitute highways.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
A highway and a public road have different way to be constructed, various layers, which use up at different rates, depending on the traffic. If you reroute a highway traffic, in a sizeable manner , through a smaller road, it will suffer, and generally will require maintenance far more quickly. I can't be sure for this specific local road, but usually they are in the budget of the city. Then you have additional problem like having the passerby or local resident having to endure far more traffic than the road should have, possibly lowering significantly the price of the house they bought.
So no it isn't as simple as you push it.
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I don't mind you driving by my front door with a quiet, clean electric car.
A diesel semi, that's another matter.
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If these neighborhoods want to pick and choose the people who can use their "private" roads, then they can take over maintenance, marking, and replacement and stop sticking it to the taxpayer.
If there is a regular enough problem that is short enough to bypass on local streets, maybe said traffic engineers should spend their time actually FIXING the problem that is causing the traffic jam
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
schedule admissions onto the freeway so folks wait at home or work instead of on the freeway.
Or put up 'no through traffic' signs and use license plate scanners to enforce the rules.
Why not put automatic tolling during commute hours, at a fairly high rate, that is exempted when you enter the area but spend at least 30 minutes there before leaving?
It would capture funds from the people just cutting through during rush hour, or deter them from using the street.
If you decide to stop from breakfast or other forms of business within the area, you're not tolled as you spent more than X minutes in the area.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Have the local councilor install speedbumps or chicanes to slow down traffic. Put in a few of those and Waze will quickly adjust to avoid that area.
Wait.. wut? The drivers are the people using the resource. The drivers are the people competing with one another for the resource. The drivers are the ones complaining about the resource not being limitless and their portion of the resource being too small due to so many other people just like them, wanting it. And you're saying the people who use the resource and complain about its limits, aren't the ones to blame?
I think they shoulder 100% of the blame, to the exclusion all other parties.
Of course they're to blame. Now, that doesn't mean they're bad, evil, etc. I'm not saying they're wrong. But yes, I'm saying that you're wrong that they aren't to blame. If you walk into a crowd, you're part of the crowd. Don't like crowds? Then avoid joining crowds! If you're in a crowd, you're to blame for your discomfort stemming from being in a crowd.
So the city planners solution to having utterly failed at their jobs by not building roads capable of dealing with the traffic is to try to force people to stick with the complete failure they engineered? Here's your sign.
To put this in perspective rather than look at this as a lessons learned and an opportunity to succeed they are attempting to block the systems citizens have come up with to overcome their failure. That should be grounds for every person involved in the planning, from the governor down, to be fired and someone with sense to be put in instead. This action or reaction is the city planners admitting they are utterly incompetent and incapable of actually planning or engineering anything. If a business tried to operate this way they'd be bankrupt in months, unless they were maintained by government subsidy.
city planners are upset that people are going around traffic instead of waiting in it?!
"How dare you circumvent the congestion I planned!"
How about, design the highways to not be that congested and then people wont need to circumvent them.
I can understand the neighborhood distress over cars driving past their expensive houses but since public money built and maintains those roads it is really too bad. What will happen eventually is they will add lights, exuberant police enforcement or have the speed limit set to crawl to try and dissuade errant motorists.
While i understand the reaction of the locals to implement turn restrictions and harsh speed control mechanisms to deter this, it sounds like they are fighting nature. (yes humans are part of nature) Instead of fighting perfectly logical, natural behavior, there should be another way to solve/tackle this problem, and i don't think any of the comments thus far (which seem to fall either into "MORE MASS TRANSIT" or "BIGGER FATTER ROADS") are the optimal solution
Real traffic engineers know that eventually traffic will take the fastest route. Every single time.
Once upon a time it was safe to let children play in the street - or at least walk to a friend's house on the sidewalk. This reflected the fact that the traffic was limited in residential areas. The idea that we should sacrifice our kids safety to motor vehicles who have no NEED to be in an area is one that needs further thought. The rise in traffic flows in residential areas is a classic example of the boiled frog problem - one where an issue has got worse so slowly that noone has reacted to what is actually a massive loss for the community.
All I can point to is the policy of our local council here where such narrow humps are standard policy on new traffic calming measures - though that may just be their way of saving money!
Considering my California wages are gouged 33% from taxes, California should fix it Fremont's Mission Boulevard. I'm not paying my taxes because I want to. I'm paying them for California to do their job.
Fuck you if you complain. It's traffic. You're not saving yourself from anything by having traffic on the highway. Pollution is all around. Get a grip, people.
The solution is very simple: put toll booths at the off ramps. The tolls could then be use to fund High Speed Rail (TM), to take other people other places that they don't want to go.
Why not set a speed limit of zero?
It's being done. It's not uncommon to see streets closed off completely for special events.
Closing them off during rush hour isn't a far stretch as long as you don't block access to driveways.
And you know they're commuters and not folks a few blocks from home... how exactly?
Not to mention, you're a stupidly clueless as the original poster - failing to note the discussion was about people forced off the freeway, not people choosing to get off the freeway.
That would be because they were fucking idiots.
They specifically tested models of bikes that took no considerations at ALL for either efficiency or pollution, and there is strong evidence that they
actually jiggered them up a bit to make it even worse (people subsequently ran tests on similar bikes, and got WAY WAY lower numbers).
And even when you took their numbers, they were talking percentages. when you took simple 'pollution per mile' even their messed with bikes were
better than a car!
Good old politics, got to love it.
Now, look at the figures for a modern commuter bike.
Take a Honda Grom 125 (yes, stupid name). 105MPG. Scooters regularly get 150-200MPG.
Hell, a CBR 250R, a small SPORTS bike, gets towards 70..
There are plenty of 'California spec' bikes with catalytic converters, etc - although at those fuel economies its almost irrelevant as absolution emissions are so low.
Thought you'd be smart by spouting some electronics knowledge eh? Go back to school. You two are saying the same thing. The physics of water can be directly inserted into Ohm's Law just like several other areas of physics. Water Flow=Current, Pressure=Voltage, Pipe Diameter=Resistance. There are more analogous terms but I'm only talking about the basic Ohm's Law that you mentioned. The fact that these terms are easily substituted is part of the driving force for the Unified Field Theory that never came to be (not everything substitutes). So when OP said "Any way it has to", he said "takes the path of least resistance". Stop being pedantic, Mr Knowitall
Google Maps, Apple Maps, and many GPS units are not real time crowdsourced so they won't tell you where THE POLICE are. That's why you use Waze- to find the speed traps. The cops hate that so much they tried to get it banned. There were several stories on here about it.
Why the hostility? Are you having a bad day/life or something? It's within your power to improve things! Try being nice to people, you will be happier and your life and day will go better.
I'm on 680, the robot tells me to get off at mission, I follow about a hundred cars doing the same. I see a store I want to shop at and follow about a dozen cars into the lot. They are all getting off the freeway and going to the packed store. I watch them do it. I talk to people in the store, we share some gallows humor about the traffic. I'm not just making shit up here, ok?
Man, you really need that seminar!