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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.
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.
The article contradicts much of the summary:
And
So basically, someone has a theory that a counter-intuitive result which doesn't match people's experience and implies people getting off a stopped freeway makes traffic worse (but that people can't figure that out over time in a scenario which plays out frequently on their daily commute), but hasn't actually come up with evidence for that theory (at least, not in this article nor paper), but hey, look at the shiny theory!!!
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
It's not "selfish" in the context of human attitudes towards achieving a solution to a problem, it's in the context of game theory - the alternative would be to choose the option that leads to the greater good, even if it means you personally benefit less than the alternative option. Assuming that the paper is correct, then the problem we have at the moment is that the software tools need to evolve to a point where they can dynamically determine the optimum number of cars to direct off a congested highway to achieve the most efficient overall flow. I guess the ideal would be that the navigational systems work in real-time to direct enough traffic off the highway that it increases congestion on the sideroads to the point that all possible routes would take the same amount of time, although that would almost certainly be NP complete, given the number of vehicles and unique destinations to account for.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
"Selfishness? Just because people are using the information that's available to them?"
Well yes, actually. Let's go back a few years. About 20 years to be exact. In a city on the other side of the world to most of the USA. We had a power cut. City wide. In winter. For two days straight.
I've never gotten to work faster. Without traffic lights, people gave way. Without the enforced controls that those traffic lights provide, every.single.driver assessed the immediate (visual range) traffic conditions and let the busiest routes through. Mine was not the busiest route. But when those on the busiest routes play the same game the same way, everybody wins. Traffic lights alone cannot achieve the same. Their fixed rules are too simple
Fast forward to today and tell me what has changed. Business is selfish. And the employees play the same game. The mapping apps are no better than the traffic lights alone from 20 years ago. Fixed rules are replaced by selfish ones. Matters are worse. We will need an order of magnitude faster computing power and mobile network bandwidth to make a difference. And centralized control. In a decentralized control world.
I foresee a world where paying more for an Uber get's you there faster.
"they want to slow everything down"
So true. Here in the UK some councils deliberately set the phase of traffic lights to stay red longer , ostensibly to make crossing easier for pedestrians, but its common knowledge (especially in London) that its designed to cause traffic jams so car drivers stay away. Also one way streets and systems, dead-ended streets that were previously a through route and bus only streets are another way town planners can really fuck up the traffic flow. Which in a city like London which does have decent public transport they can just about get away with, but in other cities , eg Norwich, that only have buses it becomes a poor joke.
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.
Since the problem is massive congestion on our roadways, the problem to solve is capacity, which is sometimes difficult to budget based on estimated future use. And of course you can't forget about the greed and corruption within construction. Gotta keep pockets lined in perpetuity with never-ending maintenance and expansion.
I'm not saying that building more roads is the solution. Lots of governments are about to go bankrupt on road maintenance alone.
Oh, they've solved that whole budget thing around me. Every new road being built is a fucking toll road. Problem solved.
However I think technology can save us here.
There was hardly any road traffic last week when kids were on spring break, proving just how much of an impact school alone can be with congestion. We have high-speed internet at home, inexpensive VPN technology, and cloud collaboration. Companies have the capacity to support remote work. They refuse to do so. Same goes with high school. Millions could be saved if we converted high-school to virtual school.
We have the technology already today to fix the congestion problem. The real problem is ignorance and refusal to embrace it.
Actually this is not the first time I've read about this. People that live on residential streets that are close to major highways have had problems with Waze and the like routing way more cars through their streets than it was designed for. They design residential streets for a typical traffic flow and not for a lot of cars bypassing traffic on a regular basis. Imagine living on one of these streets and having hundreds of cars come down there daily, when it was never designed for that and thus making your quiet residential road into a high traffic road.
A quick google search turns up lots of stores and people complaining about this.
http://kalw.org/post/driving-a...
https://www.waze.com/forum/vie...
http://www.latimes.com/opinion...
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
Companies should offer flexible working hours, with say core mandatory hours between 11 and 3. Then there isn't a mad rush for everyone to get in a t 9 AM, overloading the road network.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC