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.
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.
Or you can do what most major cities around the world do, which is fund mass transit at extremely high levels, to encourage people to not drive.
The Bay Area has some unique geographical features that make the sort of public transit that works extremely well in other places more difficult here; that said, it's still pretty good.
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.