4 ms·
This is not a NOMs problem but a complete breakdown in planning to provide adequate transportation. The apps only exacerbated the problem. The problem is that
by maire 7y ago
This is not a NOMs problem but a complete breakdown in planning to provide adequate transportation. The apps only exacerbated the problem.
The problem is that California stopped building freeways in 1975 and we don't have much in the way of public transportation. Therefore people end up driving at freeway speeds in neighborhoods with children and pets.
An interesting example is highway 17 which is the only freeway between silicon valley and the beach. On a hot summer day the entire freeway is gridlocked. Beach goers believe they can get there faster if they drive through the streets of Los Gatos. This shuts down an entire town.
There are plenty of stories about how we dismantled public transportation after WW2. I am not sure how true they are so I won't repeat them. One thing that is true is that eminent domain has become much more costly in California making it difficult to rebuild public transportation after we dismantled it.
Here is an article on why we stopped building freeways:
https://www.accessmagazine.org/fall-1993/why-california-stopped-building-freeways/ https://www.accessmagazine.org/fall-1993/why-california-stop...
- nullc 7y ago> Beach goers believe they can get there faster if they drive through the streets of Los Gatos. Google Maps directs them there -- I doubt any human judgement would really find those residential cut-troughs plausible in the slightest. I'm sure that absent the mapping apps a few antsy drivers would try diverting through the neighborhoods just to keep moving, but it takes mechanized stupidity to direct enough traffic there to congest the neighborhoods.
- masonic 7y agoGoogle Maps directs them there Waze, specifically
- nullc 7y agoMaps does this too, I've experienced it first hand (and in another post I gave a link to maps driving directions doing it which you can reproduce for yourself most saturday mornings). Perhaps Waze does more of it but maps is by no means innocent of it. Years ago the people running maps seemed to care. When I found maps specifically directing drivers to break the law (route through dulles airport in order to bypass the tolls on 267) a report to maps was almost instantly acted on to correct the behavior. Today maps makes innumerable mistakes and creates enormous externalized costs including tremendous amounts of pollution, disruption of people's quiet enjoyment of their properties, and even occasional loss of life (see article on maps directing drivers onto railroad tracks) and google cannot even be bothered to respond.