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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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Thanks to Waze, Dr. Bayen’s formerly uncongested secret route into work is now full of cars.
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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...
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.
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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.
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.
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)
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"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.
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...
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.
And those last paragraphs are the problem, with your traffic optimized app you're entering and driving through rich people hoa's much more often. Many times these developments were built in an optimal place for nearby shopping and work centers thus also being a shortcut between two or more arterial roads.
Especially California where rich people are concentrated at the expense of the rest of the US and their own state, where you can have low income housing if you make less than 95k/y, how dare you drive your Honda Civic through our gold encrusted vineyards.
A local town where I live had the same "problem" - they built the roads to optimize mansion developments and unintentionally built a highway between two interstates. Then they called for a town meeting on what to do about increased usage from out-of-towners in the last couple of years.
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I'm inclined to agree with you on public transit in the forms of subways or commuter rail but all bus systems seem to universally suck (with the exception of Helsinki, Finland). I've used bus systems in multiple cities and countries and they are universally more difficult to use then either the subway or commuter rail systems. Assuming the schedule is posted, it's often illegible due to age or the scratches on the cheap plexiglass the stations use for posting it. Or it's a public holiday and the bus lines are running on a different schedule that isn't posted at the stop but can only be gotten from the local transit authority website. Change-overs or bus-line intersections or whatever you want to call them are rarely posted. Often times the transit routes themselves aren't posted or they're posted by color (for example, the Red Line) while the bus sports a number (the #1 Line) and there's no key/legend to let you know what is what.
Assuming you can figure out how to get from A to B, often times getting from A to B takes WAAAY longer than it would take by either subway or commuter rail or car. Using San Antonio as an example, though admittedly an extreme one, it took an acquaintance of mine 45 minutes to walk from his apartment to his job. Using the bus, it took two hours and two transit-line changeovers.
Every subway or commuter rail line I've ever ridden (all European admittedly) has had a nicely labeled sign at every stop, with clear instructions on how the lines intersected, where the various stops were within the city, and what time you could expect the next train for normal workdays, weekends, and public holidays.
In short, I don't object to buses in principle, but in practice they're often poorly executed. Maybe fire the bus people and hire some commuter rail / subway folks to design their information signs.
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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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Assuming the schedule is posted, it's often illegible due to age or the scratches on the cheap plexiglass the stations use for posting it.
The busses here all have digital displays at the bus stops telling you when the next three buses will arrive, as well as timetables posted online. They still suck for other reasons, but that's largely due to the fact that most people here cycle and a bus is only faster than a bicycle over relatively long distances.
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If the roads are used for large volumes of traffic, the cost of these roads will go up a lot (more than the cost of the same traffic on highways, because of the different road surfaces). Does 'the public' want to pay that increased cost, or do they just want to use the roads and not pay for them?
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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.
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You are missing a key component - all these mapping systems use traffic data that is compiled by departments of transportation, as well as sometimes crowdsource information from the users of the app.
When you leave the arterials and highways, the resolution of data drops dramatically, so there is a good chance that Google Maps (et. al.) will *not* keep people away from the secondary / tertiary roads because it just doesn't know that it's all jammed up. If every car was all reporting data into the same collective data source about traffic conditions and position, then the entire road system could be maximized as you suggest. However, we aren't even close to that, so only parts of it that have sufficient data can be maximized, and any traffic that gets redirected to "blind spots" is just a guess, and that guess could turn out to be wrong.
Plus, routing a freeway worth of traffic through a residential neighborhood probably isn't the best idea for many reasons. There's a reason why highways have multiple lanes, concrete dividers, limited access, and wide shoulders - it's to increase the capacity by reducing intersection points, increase safety for operation of vehicles at speed, and reduce the amount of pedestrians and other non-motorized traffic.
And, if the planners get wind of people using particular neighborhood streets to bypass the designated arterials, they usually end up spending money to get people back to "where they should be" by increasing the amount of stop signs, adding "speed humps", and in extreme cases narrowing roads to make a neighborhood "more walkable" even though nobody asked for that, and adding "bike boulevard" curb extensions that block the lane heading into the neighborhood that make it a complete pain in the ass to get to your house in your car should you live on one of those "boulevards", etc. And basically all of those make the traffic worse, because at the end of the day people still need to get where they are going.
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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.
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.
"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.
Sorry, but this conspiracy theory was blown out of the water long ago. The longer red phase (in the UK, there are a few seconds between the light going red and the other road going green) was a direct response to red light runners and has reduced traffic light collisions since.
Traffic issues in Norwich and Cambridge are the direct result of piss-poor planning. I live in Berkshire and it can handle the traffic volume it has (as long as people stay off the bloody phone) because county and city planners did a decent job of creating routes that work. London is really doing the best it can, but it's 9 million people inside the M25 getting ever more dense as you get closer to the centre.
The biggest traffic problem where I am is when someone at the lights is too busy with their head buried in their phone instead of paying attention to the green light in front of them. People behind them, being British, are too polite to beep.
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