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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.
[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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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...
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.
Actually, no. You have it all wrong.
Planners have always created residential streets which are meant only for local traffic, not through-traffic. That is wholly a good thing, because maybe people who live there for one, don't want all the noise and pollution (there is a reason why freeways are surrounded by walls, and why generally one's back yard does not face a freeway directly, without obstruction), and for two, they might want to use that street for something other than a mass of cars flowing through (e.g. their children playing in it). I'm always fascinated by people who, once they get in their car, think the entire world (or at least every road) is just empty space that is supposed to have one use and one use only - to get them to their destination...but I digress.
What this study shows is that you can't fix an overcongested road system with optimization (alternative routes, self-driving cars, whatever). If there are too many cars on the road for the network to handle, you will get traffic jams. Simple as that. Now, experience (from the last 60 years or so) shows that widening roads generally does not help - it's only a short-term fix, and if you add a lane, it will soon be filled up. Unless it's - wait for it - a bus lane. Yes, because a bus lane (or a streetcar/LRT right-of-way) can transport magnitudes more people than a car lane (assuming you've got the bus service to enable that, of course - an empty bus lane or one which sees one bus an hour is wasted space).
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. This is exactly the opposite of the way California does it, and in her sprawling car-oriented suburbia, no amount of extra freeways, intelligent GPS machine-learning routing apps, or smart self-driving cars is going to fix traffic problems. As long as the approach is the same, the results will be the same - traffic jams, traffic jams, traffic jams. There is simply a tipping point in terms of population where a primarily car-based transport system becomes inefficient.
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)
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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 ]
It doesn't even need to be that. It could be his own street, in small quiet suburbia, once safe to let your kids run around on has now turned into a highway. Google tells me to do just that every day, rather than drive the 700m further to go down the highway it takes me through a school zone where I can run slalom between cars and kids.
I think a big part of traffic problems is that urban planners have become ideologically opposed to cars and have begun to array urban planning tools against cars to make driving difficult. We get "traffic calming" which translates as lanes removed and parking removed in favor of dedicated bike lanes (it's also snowy and below freezing about 4 months out of the year).
The hope is people will find driving so difficult they give up cars for bikes or transit without considering that both are a poor substitute for cars in many cases -- distance, poor transit systems, weather, need to carry packages, etc.
I'll grant them that suburban car-centric planning is a disaster, but mostly I consider it just pseudo-planning. To this day there are suburban shopping areas where it's like 5 large tenants built buildings and lots and whatever adjoining space was left becomes a "road" which results in absurdities like requiring 4 left turns to get anywhere.
I just figure there has to be a middle way that's not so anti-car it makes things impossible but not so pro car you wind up with a wasteland of roads.
They are for public use, but the road surfaces are often cheaper because they are intended for less traffic. If you increase traffic significantly, you will damage the road surfaces. This, in turn, will increase the wear on the cars travelling over it. When the municipality eventually repairs the road, they will either spend more on a tougher road surface or they will add measures to discourage through traffic (chicanes, speed bumps, one way systems, barriers, and so on).
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