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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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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??
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
"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.