Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 buses have a 15% utilization rate? Sound here the buses hold 90 off people when full. At 15%, that's about 10 people. They take up the space of little more than a car when travelling at speed: the safety gap you need to leave is far longer than the bus. Sounds like a net win for making more space available for cars.
I'll also bet that like here, the utilization is MUCH higher at rush hour, when demand for space on the road is heaviest, meaning the gains are much better.
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...
They could, but I always find it strange when drivers make these kinds of complaints. The most effective thing for improving things for drivers is to get fewer people to drive. That way the roads will be clearer for you. Objecting to politicians spending money on non-car forms of transport seems to be like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
Mass transport is going from where you aren't to where you don't need to be.
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.
Mass transport is going from where you aren't to where you don't need to be.
That's funny. Two local buses and an express bus gets me from my front door at 6AM to the front door of my job 30 miles away at 7AM. Best commute I ever had in 30 years of taking public transit.
They just did the opposite here, reducing a 4 lane freeway to two "peasant" lanes and turning the other two lanes into expensive toll lanes ("Lexus lanes"). The tolls can be as much as $10 for a one way trip. This is on I-405 from Everett to Renton in WA state.
$20 per day times 250 days per year....so about $5000 a year to get back and forth to work. And we already paid for those fucking roads with our tax dollars.
Now, of course, the traffic in the "peasant" lanes is terrible, just super super bad. Gee, who could have foreseen that?
Lots of people would love to kill the fuckers that made this happen. I mean really kill them, with guns and knives and shit.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
That's funny. Two local buses and an express bus gets me from my front door at 6AM to the front door of my job 30 miles away at 7AM. Best commute I ever had in 30 years of taking public transit.
And you probably represent a small fraction of a small percent. In many areas of the county, the mass transit simply doesn't work well because everyone is going everywhere and there are not enough routes or connections. Nobody is going to trade crawling in a traffic jam for an hour (in their own car) to standing outside multiple times in the rain, jumping from one bus to another, dealing with smelly and loud people for 1.5 hours.
Awesome. Trying to take public transportation for my 39-mile commute would take 2 hours 49 minutes. I had a 30-mile commute for my previous job, which would have required almost 4 hours of public transportation. Sometimes, it's just not a viable option. My biggest complaint is that the two available train options don't have an "express" that runs the bulk of the distance directly. They insist on running as local-only service, which really limits the people-hours bandwidth. I'm already going to have a car to get to the station. Collect the commuters at a regional station and haul them directly to the next big hub. Stop with the at-grade crossings to pick up 3 people every 2 miles.
So.. You are telling me that there are no special bus lanes that could otherwise be carrying cars?
Some places yes. But the congestion happens at junctions mostly. The bus lane allows the bus to skip the traffic queues at the junctions. I don't see how it would increase the throughput at the junction however, since the junction itself is what causes the congestion.
That the buses don't have very high fuel (and therefore pollution) footprints
Not per passenger mile, they don't. But are you complaining about fuel economy or congestion? They're different problems (though often with the same solutions because of physics).
and that they don't cost the city huge amounts in subsidies
The roads cost a huge amount too. If the bus subsidy reduces the congestion more effectively than the equivalent amount of money spent on roads, then you should be in favour of it.
I wonder what color the sky is in your world.
Mostly grey, but I live in a part of the world where buses are heavily used and the idea of operating without public transport is so patently absurd that all but the most reality-denying feverent of wingnuts are in favour of it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Is that a problem with public transport in general or just your poor implementation of it?
In Tokyo you can get everywhere on public transport, which runs every few minutes. It's often faster than driving. They build the tracks and over and under, even though it costs more, because they need them and 50 year ROI is fine.
the mass transit simply doesn't work well because everyone is going everywhere and there are not enough routes or connections
Personal transport simply doesn't work because everyone is going to the same place and there are is not enough capacity on the main trunk roads.
Part of fixing this requires designing your cities so that it is possible to walk or cycle around them, so that when you get off the train or bus it's no problem to walk a short way to your destination.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC