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Mapping Apps Like Waze, Google Maps, and Apple Maps May Make Traffic Conditions Worse in Some Areas, New Research Suggests (theatlantic.com)
From an Atlantic story, originally titled "The Perfect Selfishness of Mapping Apps": In the pre-mobile-app days, drivers' selfishness was limited by their knowledge of the road network. In those conditions, both simulation and real-world experience showed that most people stuck to the freeways and arterial roads. Sure, there were always people who knew the crazy, back-road route, but the bulk of people just stuck to the routes that transportation planners had designated as the preferred way to get from A to B. Now, however, a new information layer is destroying the nudging infrastructure that traffic planners built into cities. Commuters armed with mobile mapping apps, route-following Lyft and Uber drivers, and software-optimized truckers can all act with a more perfect selfishness.
In some happy universe, this would lead to socially optimal outcomes, too. But a new body of research at the University of California's Institute of Transportation Studies suggests that the reality is far more complicated. In some scenarios, traffic-beating apps might work for an individual, but make congestion worse overall. And autonomous vehicles, touted as an answer to traffic-y streets, could deepen the problem. "This problem has been vastly overlooked," Alexandre Bayen, the director of UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies, told me. "It is just the beginning of something that is gonna be much worse." Bayen and a team of researchers presented their work earlier this year at the Transportation Research Board's annual meeting and at the Cal Future conference at Berkeley in May 2017. They've also published work examining the negative externalities of high levels of automatic routing.
In some happy universe, this would lead to socially optimal outcomes, too. But a new body of research at the University of California's Institute of Transportation Studies suggests that the reality is far more complicated. In some scenarios, traffic-beating apps might work for an individual, but make congestion worse overall. And autonomous vehicles, touted as an answer to traffic-y streets, could deepen the problem. "This problem has been vastly overlooked," Alexandre Bayen, the director of UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies, told me. "It is just the beginning of something that is gonna be much worse." Bayen and a team of researchers presented their work earlier this year at the Transportation Research Board's annual meeting and at the Cal Future conference at Berkeley in May 2017. They've also published work examining the negative externalities of high levels of automatic routing.
Heh, given my experience with the traffic planners here is "they want to slow everything down", is it no wonder that people want to use Waze and similar? (What's a traffic engineer's ideal street? A dead-end.. At both ends!)
So.. yeah, frankly this requires me believing that the traffic planners are a lot more competent than I currently do.
[quote]Commuters armed with mobile mapping apps, route-following Lyft and Uber drivers, and software-optimized truckers can all act with a more perfect selfishness.[/quote]
Selfishness? Just because people are using the information that's available to them? Perhaps the government should start planning transportation according to smart people instead of sheeps. Madness, to accuse people of selfishness when it's obviously lack of planning that's the problem.
I'm not saying that building more roads is the solution. Lots of governments are about to go bankrupt on road maintenance alone. However I think technology can save us here. When I was young, I thought we'd have special equipment alongside roads, so we'd have self-driving cars. But that hasn't happened, and tech companies are now fixing this problem themselves, using AI to drive on imperfect roads.
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Thanks to Waze, Dr. Bayen’s formerly uncongested secret route into work is now full of cars.
#DeleteChrome
I have not joined miles of other dead stopped cars in traffic jams on roads completely shut down by accidents on numerous occasions.
Also, I use waze because my personal knowledge of the road never beats it by more than 30 seconds. And often attempting a personal shortcut resulted in being much slower.
But that's just me, I guess.
I also use google maps occasionally but I'm not as comfortable with it.
The thing I absolutely hate about waze is that wave to talk feature which randomly interrupts my drives and forces me to interact with with the device because my elbow moved over the phone. And I can't find a way to disable that feature.
The ads bug me a little but they only come up when the car isn't moving so not too much. I know someone has to pay the bills.
I don't know why I don't use google maps more. I just don't.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The solution proposed by Bayer is to spread out diverting drivers to different routes. You'd think that happens automatically as the shortcuts fill up and the apps start routing around those blockages, but the problem is that the traffic data available to the apps tend to lag quite a bit. Drivers know this. And that's why that video of the simulation hasn't convinced me. When apps suggest a detour but the off-ramp to that detour is congested, people often elect not to take the detour even if the app tells them it's faster. And once the freeway starts moving again, I usually see that "residual congestion" at the off-ramp clear in seconds, no one chooses the detour anymore in that case and just drives on instead.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I'm wondering if they are taking into account the overall general increase in the total number of vehicles on the road. If someone leaves a major highway to try a back road, isn't that a hint that the major highway is full of traffic? So I'm interpreting this report as noticing that all the extra cars on the road are filling up the back roads, since the major highways are about as full as they can handle.
Get over with it. Instead of sending everybody on the same route, send them probabilistically. I suspect Waze already does that, verified several times experimentally.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I use Waze on a daily basis and there have been many occasions when it has warned me of accidents or other road blocks and therefore re-routed me on other roads. That alone should be enough to incentivize its use as the net result is fewer cars on the roads.
On the other hand I agree that local roads get congested if the main through-ways are heavily trafficked. I lived for many years in a small town close to a major intersection and the issue has been addressed many times way before the smart satnavs.
How? At the local level by making the "shortcut" slower with complex one-way networks, speed bumps, speed lights etc. At the same time the regional authorities have been pushed to invest on improving the network and alleviating congestion.
What really rubs me up is comments such as "mostly financed by and for local taxpayers". We abandoned feudalism some time ago.
This is the rotten fruit of the War Against Cars.
The first problem is intentional dead ends, euphemistically called cul-de-sacs, which became the preferred layout over grid designs before the Interstate Highway System was created. This means instead of recreating Mahattan's grid plan, new developments copy Boston's maze. So any alternative route is already limited by design against throughput.
The second problem is highway construction is looked at as a bad thing, thanks to mismanagement of eminent domain. The Mass Pike's bulldozering of Boston's West End was so contentious because the people who lost their homes did not get paid for them for years. So instead of looking at economic development of the 128 tech belt, the misery of the Pike gets the attention. Land near highways is worth exponentially more than land that isn't, compared from 1950 to today.
The third is that anti-highway advocates got highway tax dollars moved to trains and buses. The system of self-supported distributed highways was replaced by making cities even more dense. These same advocates WANT more traffic because it will make these slower and ill-favored options more appealing.
The last nail is the manipulative laws that make investment and jobs grow in cities, opposed to not tipping the scales against jobs placed more evenly among where people live. There's no valid reason why Amazon should get a multi-million dollar tax break for taking up space on Boston's waterfront instead of a more accessible area.
It's all a damn cartel by the city property owners against the democratization of land.
I have a very long rant about town-planning and road infrastructure. Don't make me start it.
But there are two options - allow or penalise. If you need that amount of traffic to get to a place, you need a road, and side-roads, and feeder-roads and sink-roads that can take the capacity PLUS MORE.
If you don't WANT that amount of traffic then you have to penalise it. Tolls. Prohibitions. One way systems. Or... yes... just making it traffic-heavy. Literally traffic is it's own limiter - if it takes you an hour to get to a place because of traffic, you will change the way you get there or not go there.
Town-planners really need to work out what it is that they want because 99.9% of the time they clearly WANT the end result of the traffic (jobs, etc.) but they don't want the traffic itself. They deliberately do not invest, manage or encourage traffic while penalising it heavily, and then blaming drivers who are trying to get to work.
And traffic-management turns to nonsense when you hear the term "flow". It means "the roads are jammed, but they're still moving at 1mph so technically it's not a jam".
If you need cars to come in, then you need to widen the roads and accesses and get them in and to their destination as fast as possible.
If you don't want cars to come in, then start blocking roads and putting in other measures.
To be honest, if you can bypass traffic management by using a satnav and going another way? By now? It's been 20 years since we all started buying satnavs, that's not long enough to change how you manage the traffic? And the way to stop it? Cut off the routes those cars would use.
But, better, would be that you design and manage your roads to get everyone that needs to traverse a portion of the network through as quickly as possible.
Hint: This means no traffic lights (I'm in the UK, we have roundabouts, which technically can jam up if one entrance is overloaded but if one entrance is overloaded guess what? There's your problem, further down that road!). No ridiculously narrow roads. No cutting a lane out without any warning. No allowing traffic to block junctions (yellow hatched boxes exist in the UK - use them and enforce them).
All those things are for managing "flow", not capacity. Literally stopping 50% of the traffic for 50% of the time is not effective in terms of getting people to their destination on time. All it does is ensure you don't get complete logjam where your stupidly-designed roads narrow the traffic bandwidth.
But if you get traffic jams... it's because you've designed poorly. Having every intersection being a complete four-way, light-managed system is a symptom of this. It's where you gave up trying to direct the traffic and just said "We'll just stop them so they don't get into a complete gridlock".
I have found that in general traffic is bad on all routes at certain times of the day. Its generally referred to as Rush Hour. In fact if you have a long delay on a major interstate highway and your directing all those vehicles to secondary smaller roads. Wouldn't that create a even bigger traffic problem? Like putting 10 lbs of sand in a 5 lbs bucket.
We have had a lot of estates changed so that they either have only one entrance, others being blocked to motor vehicles by bollards. This helps prevent them from becoming rat runs. They have also put a few "no entry except for access" signs on some as an experiment, but people following sat nav seem to ignore these - not surprising as they even ignore signs that roads are impassable.
Yes, the boy is a genius (in his own mind).
Of course, he seems to have forgotten that just perhaps what these things are doing, as most of them are now traffic sensitive, is maximizing the throughput of the ENTIRE roading system.
What he actually seems to have his proverbial panties in a twist about is 'we are not following the rules the traffic planners pre-decided for us, oh no!'
I am imaging that he thinks of himself as one of those planners, and how DARE us unwashed heathens not just follow the routes our betters decide for us.
The fact is that if the secondary/tertiary roads get blocked up due to google maps routing, then google maps will KEEP PEOPLE AWAY FROM THEM. THATS HOW IT WORKS!
It is a bit less convenient for people who live in those areas? Sure. In which case lean on your town planners to avoid narrowing main roads for more bus/special/cycleway lanes, and make the primary roads larger.. because thats what services the majority, rather than pandering to a minority.
Give him another 20 years of life experience and just perhaps he will learn than central planning is pretty much ALWAYS a route to failure.
Mostly because bureaucracy rewards bureaucracy, not efficiency.
Traffic planners can now request 24/7 traffic data from these apps. Monitor in which areas drivers are forced to go off the routes they're supposed to, and then improve those roads.
I'm not sure about americunts.... But in Australia we have digital street signs that alert motorists on the motorway when there is an accident ahead... And they actually suggest taking an alternative route. Absolutely nothing to do with mapping apps on users phones. They do this primarily for safety around the scene of the accident from rubber necker's. Some law enforcement and local council's actually actively use Waze you warm motorists
All cars take the theoretically fastest route regardless of traffic/road conditions/type.
If someone leaves a major highway to try a back road, isn't that a hint that the major highway is full of traffic? So I'm interpreting this report as noticing that all the extra cars on the road are filling up the back roads, since the major highways are about as full as they can handle.
Yup, that was also my impression, specially regarding apps that try to be "smart" and guess where traffic is stuck.
Be it apps that leverage big data (Waze is supposed to autolearn traffic fluidity). Or plain old normal GPS apps that rely on the traffic announcement over FM RDS (and whatever its upcoming DAB+ successor is) to offer alternate course like almost any in-car built-in satnav.
Also : other very mundane reasons :
- not so smart apps.
not every single app has precise fluidity information for every last metet of road.
some of them fall back to plain old "speed (based on official limitation) x distance (on map)" heuristic to determin optimal path.
And thus end up advertising completely stupid routes, just because they happen to look shorter on the map, and are tagged with the same speed limit (e.g.: 50 km/h in residential area), but one is a large arterial road, the other is a tiny passage way.
Google Maps has been an offender in my experience (probably I live on the wrong side of the atlantic pond regarding to where has their cloud the most informations about), as from time to time even specialised satnav vendor such as Tomtom (Yes, I know that the pass through the montain seems much shorter on the map than taking the highway aroudn the whole mountain. But it's winter and the pass might not even be open)
---
Last, regarding the whole part autonomous cars :
Remember that the whole big advantage touted behind autonomous cars and any other shared form of transportation (shared cars as in lots of big cities including plain old non-autonomous shared cars, and even ride sharing systems as the mentioned Uber and Lyft), is that it *reduces* the number of cars on the road.
(Has been even studied, with some studies showing that 1 single shared (non-autonomous) car, replaces 4 cars).
So if autonomous cars rise in numbers, that will decrease the total flow of car and actually result in lest congestionned small streets. Not more.
(as is already the case with car sharing systems)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'm wondering if they are taking into account the overall general increase in the total number of vehicles on the road. If someone leaves a major highway to try a back road, isn't that a hint that the major highway is full of traffic? So I'm interpreting this report as noticing that all the extra cars on the road are filling up the back roads, since the major highways are about as full as they can handle.
Along those lines, the mapping software has allowed people to point at a map or do a simple search and then travel there.
Whereas, previously getting to some locations required; knowing, wanting, planning (with a map or directions) and then overcoming whatever personal apprehension or laziness they might have had.
We see this in the extreme by the cases of people doing things like driving off into a dirt road in the desert as a "shortcut" or along a railroad track. In less extremes, the tools are allowing more people to get out and drive, increasing overall congestion.
https://science.slashdot.org/s...
If you only just noticed that everyone is taking the same route, you're only about yen years behind the times.
Ironically, it is self-driving tech that will help solve the issues highlighted by the author. Self-driving tech means trucks will drive normal routes 24 hours / day instead of the 8 hours / day max that a human driver is legally allow to put in -- potentially cutting the amount of truck traffic on the roads during normal hours by up to 2/3. That's with no other changes or tweaks and by itself will make a huge difference.
Maybe if the traffic planners actually designed the roads for the correct traffic levels, including those in the future, it would make sense to use they designed routes during high traffic, but they don't. In my city they design roads with current traffic levels in mind, ignoring projected future traffic levels. This, plus the fact that construction takes years upon years to be completed by the time construction is complete the traffic level is much worse than what the construction was bringing the roads up to in the first place. This all makes traffic a nightmare in many areas. I, for one, would not like to get stuck in standstill traffic everyday just to use the planned route when there are much better routes available. Want to blame someone? Blame the traffic planners, not the drivers who are using information available to them to use completely legal roads to travel. Don't want someone going through your neighborhood? Put up signs for no through traffic and ticket drivers who violate it. Add speed bumps, or even gate your community. Use other available options instead of yelling at the GPS.
In one thousand feet you will be at your... take a u turn. Head south and and go left on a street you already passed. Take a u... you are at your... u turn.
Certainly contributes to angry driving.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Sounds like a recurrence of this old problem.
If your solution is "use a bus" then think of another one.
Why not just live in the office ? Give up your personal life and your personal space completely and just live in the office... you don't need cars, tvs, weed, beer,... and you can probably survive on some engineered food that provides nutrients and energy, like a borg drone something.
For those too autistic as is the author of the original post, this was meant to be irony.
I ain't using a bus.
They're full of shit. Google maps already largely ignores anything other than major roads for most routes.
Also, those supposed secret routes are almost always slower, unless the driver is speeding and ignoring other traffic laws.
We need to increase the budget for traffic planning to fight the fact that people optimize routes. People should be fined according to undisclosed rules until it gets clear that the current roads are perfectly balanced.
I can see two types of problems which do not require much investigation to know they exist.
One is the optimal case where information is realtime and possibly even anticipates group movement: if everyone uses one of these realtime routing apps, then traffic spreads out. It will be faster but it will use all the available routes. The other people, including the people trying to manage traffic and who want to strictly guide it along the path they want, simply don't like that.
A second is that there is no optimal case. If route A is stuck and everyone starts moving to route B 10 minutes away then the app does not anticipate that in 10 minutes route B will have a traffic jam. If you make the software smarter though, then it can anticipate. Not perfectly, but it can mitigate problem B and propose C while problem B isn't visible yet.
Who else saw this and immediately remembered the line about "but because everyone else was also trying to push forwards through the crowd"?
Unlike Wazé and others it lets you use maps offline
Parent poster says, "So the answer is more bus lanes - and more buses - and more public transit in general - not less. That's because experience shows that if you've got a city with millions of people living in it, the proper way to organize it is 1) build it at high density and 2) move people around primarily using high-capacity public transit, not cars."
Problem is, I've seen the massive financial losses incurred by some of these mass transit projects. Not talking about just the huge initial expenses, but the continual bleeding of money trying to maintain them -- plus the inevitable demands to expand them and upgrade them over time.
So is it really "proper" to insist cities invest in mass transit solutions instead of upgrading the roads and highways?
It probably is from strictly the standpoint of what's efficient for commuters. But living in the DC metro area and seeing our challenges with the existing system? Man, I just don't know? I've tried to use our mass transit options for my daily commute. Assuming I'm trying to get to and from work during normal rush hour times, it potentially cuts my transit time in half to take the train and transfer to the metro, vs. driving in during traffic jams and trying to find parking in a multi-story garage. BUT -- it's a double-edged sword because I occasionally get stuck for hours if a train breaks down and messes up the schedule OR a miss a train because my schedule doesn't allow me to make the one I intended to make. On top of that, it's gotten expensive enough so I don't think it saves me any money vs. just driving in. For me? The optimal solution is driving in but doing so during non-peak congestion hours. I'm best off working from home in the early morning and driving in late in the morning, and staying a couple hours later in the office until traffic dies down before heading home.
I've never really seen a bus system that ran efficiently either? By that, I mean most buses are nowhere near filled to capacity and they seem to take routes that aren't useful to a lot of potential riders. People, in turn, demand additional routes to service their needs. When that happens, it tends to only help a small minority of people who were the loudest about needing the public transportation -- so costs of operation keep going up.
Not necessarily. Here in the UK there are two major motorways which Waze will happily route you off one onto a reasonably quiet residential road to join up with the other.
The alternative would just be to stick on the first motorway and switch to the second motorway. However that journey takes two minutes longer to do (even on a quiet day/time) so it is not considered the fastest route and therefore not offered - despite actually being safer to drive and more considerate of the locals.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
This seems like a corollary of Braess' s Paradox
I remember reading the same crap for several years now.
In Germany in some streets, where traffic is impossible, neighbors put all their old cellphones in the mailbox (near the street) and claim there's a complete traffic stop, to try to move the traffic to another neighborhood, which, I'm sure, does the very same thing.
From empirical evidence, yes, a bus carries more people than a single car but, it moves at 1/4 of the speed so immediately you can say that instead of let's say 40 people/hour, it carries 10/hour. Further, a bus route has a bus that goes out every 15 minutes at best. That is totally inefficient as those 10/hour people if in a car would have been spread out more. Secondly, a bus is seldom fully utilized, it's mean load is probably 1/2 full or less. Lastly, a bus utilizes the actual transport medium (the street) less efficiently. It actually blocks the more efficient means of transportation (cars). No way a bus is more efficient than the number of cars needed to transport the same number of people.
Ever watch a flock of small birds -- how they stay together, twisting and turning in a mass concentration? Now imagine them restricted to 2 dimensions and channeled by streets, and impeded by stop signs and traffic lights, but still all going to roughly the same place. That's what car traffic will look like when everyone uses an app to get to work.
Last Thanksgiving, coming back from Las Vegas, the I-15 was jam packed, so Google maps rightly routed us through Pahrump and then down the 127. Getting into Baker, the 127 was backed up 45 minutes, so Google maps suggested Well Road and Mill Road. These turned out to be no more than offroad trails around Baker, and one car which had attempted it was stuck in a 3 foot deep ditch that crossed the road (but could be circumnavigated by going further off-road about 100 feet). Using tiny dirt trails as roads is a pretty sure sign that Google does more than just major roads. And this is for a highly-traveled path from Las Vegas to Los Angeles.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I saw aerial pics of my town from 1924. It was very sparsely populated. One of the few roads from 1924 is still present totally unchanged. And, it is one of the junctions that is totally backed up and congested EVERY day. Let's think about it. In almost 100 years, these lazy asshats have made zero improvements, meanwhile the area went from 1,000 residents to 100,000 residents. I have sent in 'suggestions' on how to improve 2 intersections where there are obvious solutions as to why they congest. They have incorporated neither.
To this day, they still design things with the misbegotten idea that people can actually zipper merge.
If they're unhappy, it's likely a good thing.
On top of that, it's gotten expensive enough so I don't think it saves me any money vs. just driving in.
That can be fixed (and infrastructure improvements paid for) by raising the gas tax.
In Britain, for example, fuel is about $6.3 per gallon. That also reduces pollution, BTW.
Braess's Paradox
In some scenarios, traffic-beating apps might work for an individual, but make congestion worse overall.
You cannot improve traffic for each person in the population and simultaneously make traffic worse for the population as whole. It's a literal logical and mathematical impossibility.
Now, however, a new information layer is destroying the nudging infrastructure that traffic planners built into cities.
Translation: People are now able to route around infrastructure that was intentionally designed to impede the smooth flow of traffic, and now some asshole who wants you to get out of your car and ride a bike to work feel like you're selfish for doing so. Boo fucking hoo.
program things to assume worst case when the info is missing (so if the info is missing assume that the road is a 400 YO cobblestone path fit for horse carts only).
This subject brings out all the small-souled bugmen, clutching their precious "optimizing" technology
I have a couple friends who admit they have absolutely no sense of direction, so for them, smart phones and the like are a god-send.
But for me and others, who are familiar with where live, and have a sense of direction... we practically never use mapping apps.
Do locals use this software 24/7?
Speed bumps are the solution. I would add tire spikes on one way streets.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Where do you live? The expensive fuel just cuts into your "nice to have budget". The roads are still crammed to the hilt, slow and frustrating. It's just that it's really expensive to sit there in traffic. Also the public transport is mostly crap outside of the capital (and even then...) I tried commuting. I really did. But 1 huor is shit traffic is still preferable to 2 hours on a bus that goes through every frigging estate in the city before offloading you miles from where you actually need to be.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
Instead of sending everybody on the same route, send them probabilistically. I suspect Waze already does that, verified several times experimentally.
It may have changed more recently, but for the past several years when driving medium-range routes in certain parts of the city it's been very common to find myself in an obvious "Waze pack" of several cars making exactly the same (completely arbitrary and unintuitive) series of several turns through residential areas to avoid congested secondary streets. There must be literally hundreds of potential routes through gridded neighborhoods like that with roughly the same transit times, so it would be awesome if they've taken steps to spread traffic across them.
Many people using navigation apps just results in the optimal route quickly becoming non-optimal, and a different optimal route being chosen a few minutes later. The apps are also really good for warning about accidents ahead and suggesting an alternate route, which should on average help people spend less time stuck in traffic.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Huh? Doesn't widening roads and highways also incur massive financial losses?
Can you name even one road in your state that makes a profit? Texas couldn't, and they're a red state so they have an incentive to show that their roads are a more worthwhile investment than the mass transit loved by blue states. Remember the old Vulcan proverb, "only Nixon could go to China."
And when you raze taxpaying properties to make room for more subsidized lanes, you're reducing your tax base and making the budget problem worse!
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
In my metro area (Mpls-St Paul), city buses cost almost exactly the same per passenger mile to operate as roads do. And that's if you look at the bus system as a whole. When you look at the urban-local lines (as oppose to express and suburban), they cost less. And the trains cost much, much less per passenger mile - somewhere on the order of 1/4 the expense of roads and buses.
From intersection to intersection, USA's traffic moves in stop 'n' go red wave fashion. I have never ever witnessed a so-called green wave of traffic lights in the USA like I sometimes get to witness in on European roads. I always see red lights popping ahead of approaching crossings of U.S. roads. No green waves what-so-ever. I call it sand bagging the traffic and pushing it like packets on a conveyor belt. No matter how powerful you car may be, you never get to try it out in the open. Mexican roads have their built-in bumpers every few hundred meters or so, American roads have their built-in ever-appearing stop signs and red wave traffic lights.
But if an app tells everyone to take that back road, it's making the situation worse. The app is attempting to optimize a single user's route but as a side effect it is making everyone's route worse. If the apps distributed the load it would help out more, even making the single user's commute easier. Ie, if there are three backroad routes, why not send different users to different backroads?
Although in Silicon Valley there often is only one route to take with no viable alternatives that don't add an hour or more. So I will see coworkers look at their apps, bitch that the commute is terrible, then leave anyway so that they can sit in the peak traffic they were warned about. They could have waited a bit longer to go home though...
Meanwhile on the freeways, the high occupancy lanes aren't really high occupancy when they only have 2 people, all the non-HOV lanes are almost exclusively full of single occupant vehicles. All the effort to encourage people to use a carpool, or mass transit, etc, aren't actually changing behavior. Autonomous cars won't improve this as passengers are still going to want to be the only passenger in them.
Try waiting.
I had to go down to Denver for a week-long training session. First day, I left at 7:30 and got there at 9 right when it started. Except they had coffee and donuts and didn't start until 9:15 (and they weren't handing out tardy demerits).
Next day, I leave at 7:45. Get there at 9 again. Huh? Maybe difference between Monday and Tuesday.
Wednesday morning, I leave at 8 and get there at 9 and still have coffee and donuts.
Congestion is an interesting thing. You might be able to ride the wave later and still get there on time.
That's where a lot of armchair analysts and Libertarian wannabes miss the mark. My city implemented a new bus line at a cost of $200 million. The local paper had a race between a car, a bike and a bus rider.
That makes for good clickbait but that isn't the measurement to make if you're trying to run a city efficiently. Let's try moving 10,000 people by car (say 7,000 cars), then by 10,000 bicycles, and then by the number of bus trips.
"Winning" is an entirely different measure than mere time.
I was thinking it was looking at how people taking side roads in some areas are basically "cutting in line". Where i live there is a side route that you can drop off the freeway and then get back on right before where the congestion ends so you are effectively adding to the congestion (because of the heavy merging) but lowering your total trip time. Of course, as the article states, now with the apps you have everyone trying to use this route so the alternate route is just as congested as the primary with the added bonus of making it more congested still on the primary route.
I've thought about this before, especially with a past commute. If I left for home at 6:30 then it might take an hour to get home. If I left at 7:00 it might take a half hour to get home. So I wondered what sort of equation could result determining optimum time to leave, how to simulate this, etc.
What makes it tricky is that the point of disturbance, where someone had a flat tire or what not, causes a wave of congestion going backwards. Ie, those times when traffic suddenly clears up and you don't see any accident or other cause, is because the congestion has moved backwards and past you. So, there might be a big congestion if you leave early, and if you leave slightly later you'll still hit that wave, but if you wait long enough the wave will have moved moved past your starting point and you'll never know anything was amiss. If you're far enough away then the wave may diminish enough that you don't notice it.
The government should get a very depersonalized set of data from these companies to figure out where they need to upgrade things. anyone in Portland, Oregon knows damn well to never try to get to Vancouver on a Friday afternoon between 4:30 and 8pm. The last time (16March2018) I went by there 84 was backed up to 162. The banfield (84 between the 205 and I-5) was backed up both directions (people trying to get on to I-5 north and 205 north) and I-5 south of Portland (North bound) was a parking lot as well. It was under 5mph for a while. More lanes would help here but no one wants to build a bridge that can handle the traffic. 30W could use an upgrade and be used to by pass the traffic that wants to go to Vancouver, Walnut Grove, Salmon Creek, etc. The issue is that we built roads between locations people want to go and never accounted much for the traffic that wants to past those locations. We also did not factor in the population growth. Portland also has some issue with making bridges big enough over the Columbia. They need at least 5 more lanes across the river.
Problem is, I've seen the massive financial losses incurred by some of these mass transit projects. Not talking about just the huge initial expenses, but the continual bleeding of money trying to maintain them -- plus the inevitable demands to expand them and upgrade them over time.
So is it really "proper" to insist cities invest in mass transit solutions instead of upgrading the roads and highways?
Freeways are ridiculously expensive to build and maintain (unless you're building them through a flat desert), especially in cities. Not to mention that in many cities, they are just not feasible - either there is no physical space to add a lane or built a new freeway, or the property that needs to expropriated to enable it costs magnitudes more than the freeway itself. Think of a rail line - how many passengers can it carry per hour? How about a freeway? Then which is more expensive to maintain per mile? Per mile per passenger?
Roads of other types and streets also cost money. They are only not considered as being "subsidised" and "losing money" because everyone views them as essential public infrastructure and because there are taxes collected to cover their expenses...but is any road "profitable"? Apart from some toll freeways built by private investors (which in the US, are generally the exception). Not every toll road or bridge is profitable (if it's publicly owned) - the toll may be there to just cover part of the costs, just like in most public transit systems, the ticket revenue only covers a part of the expenses. I mean - another example - are parks "profitable"? Yet the same people who don't even give a second thought to how roads are funded object about tax dollars subsidizing public transit and demand that public transit projects be "profitable".
Now, there are other costs than those which are upfront. Traffic jams cost money. It's not easy - probably impossible - to exactly calculate how much, but very good estimates exist. If a public transit system reduces traffic jams, i.e. reduces the amount of time people spend commuting - it saves money. Potentially more than the "subsidy" it receives. A good public transit system can greatly increase the productivity of a city's workforce. If all parts of the city are more accessible (including to people that don't have cars) - people benefit, because they potentially have a larger choice of jobs; employers benefit, because they potentially have a larger pool of employees to chose from; and businesses benefit, because they have a larger pool of customers. Public transit systems take up less real estate than roads, for the same capacity - this allows cities to profit by having more land developed, to increase the quality of life for residents by building more parks and pedestrian-oriented streets, and so on. If you don't need a car to get around, you can save money that you spend elsewhere in the economy (this is especially an issue for low-income people - the ones exploited by loan sharks so they can buy a clunker to get them to work in a reasonable amount of time). Public transit systems pollute less (even CO2 emissions laid aside - plain old air pollution is lower per passenger of public transit vs. private car), reducing associated health costs, and so on and so on.
All of this more than justifies investment in public transit.
It probably is from strictly the standpoint of what's efficient for commuters. But living in the DC metro area and seeing our challenges with the existing system? Man, I just don't know? I've tried to use our mass transit options for my daily commute. Assuming I'm trying to get to and from work during normal rush hour times, it potentially cuts my transit time in half to take the train and transfer to the metro, vs. driving in during traffic jams and trying to find parking in a multi-story garage. BUT -- it's a double-edged sword because I occasionally get stuck for hours if a train breaks down and messes up the schedule OR a miss a train because my schedu
I think you're neglecting some key things in your arguments.
Primarily, rail lines in America really can't move that many passengers per day because as a rule, they're operating on the tracks owned by railroads who are primarily focused on moving FREIGHT. The commuter rail traffic is viewed as a nuisance, and the railroads often take actions to hamper it whenever they can get away with it. (That's why the MARC in the DC metro area is so often running 45 minutes or more late. CSX owns the rails it runs on, and they like to schedule freight trains to conflict with it and create congestion. That's because from their viewpoint, it's better off if they can discourage people from taking the passenger rail system and stop voting on legislation that lets the states borrow their rails more than they do already.)
I don't deny that freeways are ridiculously costly to maintain .... but at the end of the day, they're just concrete or asphalt strips with some painted lines on them and signage. When you invest in a whole transit system like a streetcar or light rail system, you're multiplying the complexity exponentially. You need to hire engineers to operate the vehicles, instead of letting the users drive themselves. You have to employ a skilled maintenance staff that commands higher salaries than the guy who knows how to fill a hole using a shovel. It's not that I expect a highway to be PROFITABLE (like someone else suggested here). I just expect it to be a relatively good use of my tax dollars as a way to keep infrastructure in place that allows me to get around, and allows deliveries to arrive. The packages coming via the post office or UPS or FedEx or DHL aren't getting transported via mass transit. They're still relying on the highways and roads.
As far as complaining about mass transit despite it generally being faster than driving? I think you misunderstood? I'm not talking about having to actually sit on a train that's not moving. That's rarely happened to me, for more than a brief period of time. I'm talking about things like getting stuck standing around outside, at a train platform, waiting for 2+ hours because of a train having a mechanical issue and the updates promising it'll arrive with a 20 minute delay, then another 30 minutes, etc. etc. When that happens in the middle of winter, trust me ... it's not pleasant.
Primarily, rail lines in America really can't move that many passengers per day because as a rule, they're operating on the tracks owned by railroads who are primarily focused on moving FREIGHT. The commuter rail traffic is viewed as a nuisance, and the railroads often take actions to hamper it whenever they can get away with it. (That's why the MARC in the DC metro area is so often running 45 minutes or more late. CSX owns the rails it runs on, and they like to schedule freight trains to conflict with it and create congestion. That's because from their viewpoint, it's better off if they can discourage people from taking the passenger rail system and stop voting on legislation that lets the states borrow their rails more than they do already.)
This is an issue only for commuter trains, not other transit modes (subway trains, light rail trains, buses, etc.). Furthermore, it's not an argument against public transit per se - if that is the problem (and I do realize that is the problem in many places in the US), the solution is not to build more freeways, but to build more railways. Build more rail lines for the commuter railways, or buy rail lines from the freight operators...
I don't deny that freeways are ridiculously costly to maintain .... but at the end of the day, they're just concrete or asphalt strips with some painted lines on them and signage.
Well, no, they are not. Those would be plain old at grade roads and streets. The stuff you mention is the cheapest part of the freeway, by far. Most of the cost is in the often complicated interchanges and access/exit ramps that allow the traffic to always have its own right of way. This is what makes a freeway - a freeway, and those can be very complex and thus expensive structures. I mean, in the same vein as your comment I could say - a railway is just two steel rods over a bunch of pieces of wood, sitting on top of gravel...
When you invest in a whole transit system like a streetcar or light rail system, you're multiplying the complexity exponentially. You need to hire engineers to operate the vehicles, instead of letting the users drive themselves. You have to employ a skilled maintenance staff that commands higher salaries than the guy who knows how to fill a hole using a shovel.
I don't know when is the last time I saw road crews fix things with just shovels...usually they are operating heavy equipment. You need engineers to supervise the workers...and if you are maintaining freeway structures, it's a non-trival civil engineering task. In a public transit system, almost all of the cost is centralized (in the transit agency), and most of the complexity is visible to the users. In a road-based system, the costs are more distributed and a lot of the complexity is hidden. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. What about the traffic cops? The traffic management people? Signals and signs? Etc.
It's not that I expect a highway to be PROFITABLE (like someone else suggested here). I just expect it to be a relatively good use of my tax dollars as a way to keep infrastructure in place that allows me to get around, and allows deliveries to arrive. The packages coming via the post office or UPS or FedEx or DHL aren't getting transported via mass transit. They're still relying on the highways and roads.
The UPS truck (as well as the ambulance, fire truck, and police cruiser) is going to get to you faster if there are less cars on the road and less traffic jams. Bus lanes (the starting point of this entire discussion) also allow emergency vehicles to get to those who need them quicker (generally, in most places with dedicated bus lanes, emergency vehicles are explicitly allowed and encouraged to use them). Of course there are trips which cannot be efficiently served by public transit, and which need roads and highways...however it's in the interest of people relying on those trips (in whichever way) to have as