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.

Comments

Re:Fuck California and its "wisdom".

[VernonNemitz]

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.

it's a software bug

[mapkinase]

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.

Re:Selfishness?

[_Sharp'r_]

The article contradicts much of the summary:

Bayen said that nobody has managed to do a multi-scale analysis that can determine if the apps, even if they create local problems, are better or worse for whole traffic basins.

And

That said, they have not proven this yet. While it’s clear that these apps can put stress on local side streets, we still don’t know what effect they may have on highways, or for traffic systems as a whole.

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!!!

Re:Selfishness?

[Zocalo]

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.

Re:Lack of Experience.

[yabos]

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...

Re:Lack of Experience.

[AmiMoJo]

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.