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:Selfishness?

[Knuckles]

"Selfnishness" means to optimize for themselves. It's a well established term in economics, biology, etc., without a moral subtext

Spreading traffic

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

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:Lack of Experience.

[hazardPPP]

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.

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.