13 ms·
(IEEE Spectrum) Your navigation app is making traffic unmanageable
- gniv 3y ago"But now online navigation apps are in charge, and they’re causing more problems than they solve." We shouldn't lose perspective. That statement is not even remotely true. Compared to the time and the gas savings, the problems described in the article are relatively minor.
- cratermoon 3y agoNot far from where I live, there's a traffic light that regularly backs up, especially the left turn lane. The navigation apps started suggesting a shortcut around that light that involved a left turn cutting through a neighborhood on a gravel street and arriving at very busy street with poor sight lines and just a stop sign. Eventually the city put up plastic bollards to block the left turn.
- CamperBob2 3y agoUPS figured out decades ago that left turns in urban settings are usually suboptimal. Why don't nav applications allow drivers to avoid left turns except at intersections with left arrows?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MarioMan 3y agoWaze supports this situation and more via the “Reduce difficult intersections” toggle: https://support.google.com/waze/answer/7666303 https://support.google.com/waze/answer/7666303 It’s apparently used to apply an additional routing penalty for “difficult intersections”, assigned by map editors, which provides a robust way to avoid these situations, including difficult left turns: https://www.reddit.com/r/waze/comments/ffypgb/avoid_difficult_turns/fk2n1jg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/waze/comments/ffypgb/avoid_difficul...
- ttfkam 3y agoPublic. Transit. Cars will always be a perpetually morphing problem whose repetitively common theme is "too few people moved per unit area". De-prioritize cars. Re-prioritize walkable, bikable, and train-accessible cities.
- hulitu 3y ago> De-prioritize cars. Re-prioritize walkable, bikable, and train-accessible cities. You do realize that the traffic will be moving at the speed of walking then, or ? And mixing people with bikes and cars is a bad idea.
- cwillu 3y agoA parking lot of a busy supermarket trivially handles the foot traffic, easily funneling all of it through a handful of choke points without any (pedestrian) traffic jams. No, the only time you see a traffic jam in a parking lot is when the cars are moving, because the density is so much worse.
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago> You do realize that the traffic will be moving at the speed of walking then, or ? walkable paths do not usually overlap with cars/bicycle lane/bus lanes. but they are very effective to reduce the use of vehicles for routine activities (grocery, schools, catching public transport, meeting friends, going out for a drink, etc.) Also traffic speed is actually not that relevant, in Rome, where I live, most of the time cars move at an average speed lower than 10 km/h, the real issue is avoiding congestions, not making cars move faster. 15-20 km/h is more than enough to do what you have to do in a reasonable time. where I live in Rome to reach the station I can either take the subway (5 stops, 11 minutes), the bus (~20-25 minutes), a cab (~15-20 minutes) or my car ~30-35 minutes and forget about parking it. fast tracks for cars can be moved outside of the city, like the great ring around Rome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Raccordo_Anulare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Raccordo_Anulare
- pipodeclown 3y agoYou clearly haven't been watching the notjustbikes YouTube channel..
- isaacfrond 3y ago> Now it’s packed with cars that use it as a shortcut from congested Mission Street to heavily traveled Market Street. Residents must struggle to get to their homes, and accidents are a daily occurrence. Of course people who used to have preferential access to a convenient shortcut would prefer that things remain that way. But why should they be the only one that get to use that road? Why are the needs of other people who want to get from A to B any less important. Odd view this is.
- Doxin 3y agoI feel like giving priority to residents isn't that weird an opinion to hold. No one wants a traffic jam out their front door.
- ohgodplsno 3y agoBecause they live here, and because particle pollution and sound pollution actively kills people. Additionally, these roads were built assuming low amounts of traffic. To continue on with your logic: why are pedestrians complaining that I'm driving on their sidewalk? What are their needs to have a safe place to walk at more important than my needs to get to my office really fast?
- crote 3y agoYou can hardly call it a "shortcut" when it is the only way to reach your destination. All roads are designed for a specific purpose, and roads designed for destination traffic simply aren't capable of handling large volumes of through traffic. Other people are supposed to go the long way because that's literally what the roads are designed for.
- isawczuk 3y agoThis a new vector of attack. Force navs to reroute traffic because of fake alerts.
- rft 3y agoAlready done, the low tech way even. https://www.wired.com/story/99-phones-fake-google-maps-traffic-jam/ https://www.wired.com/story/99-phones-fake-google-maps-traff...
- ale42 3y agoAnd the somewhat-higher-tech way (back in 2007): https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-07/Barisani_and_Bianco/Presentation/bh-usa-07-barisani_and_bianco.pdf https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-07/Barisani_an...
- lucidguppy 3y agoTo be honest I already thought programs like waze partnered with local metro area governments to reduce traffic. Guess I was wrong. Open up an API for governments to drop in temporary blockers in the map (with appropriate lead-up times too). Competitors could come to some agreement on using each other's apis for emergency or traffic jam alerts.
- mihaic 3y agoTech being forced to interact with government to generally improve society seems to be such a foreign concept with the tech world that now I'm not sure how the anti-gov propaganda can be unwound.
- tennisflyi 3y agoDo apps like this not “load balance”?
- ivanbakel 3y agoThis is covered in depth in the article. Apps do load-balance, but the main issues are: * they can only load-balance in their own datasets, which means that users of different apps can over-compete for the same small amount of road capacity * load-balancing is often implemented in a naïve way that fails to account for how particular roads aren't meant to take increases in traffic
- DaveFlater 3y agoMy current burb has been fighting "cut through" traffic since before phone navigation was a thing. They do it with "traffic calming" (filling streets with obstacles to through-traffic) and designs that give people no alternative to getting on the main stroad. The result has been sheer hell. The frustration level is so high that whenever the main stroad is not gridlocked it is like Fury Road: harrowing for drivers and 100% lethal to peds and cyclists. But I guess that one guy on the side street who was shaking his fist at people speeding past his house is happy now.
- DragonStrength 3y agoI don't begrudge people who want their residential neighborhood streets to be residential. The issue is usually the development choices. The main cut through like you're describing near me recently had large bumps added to prevent speeding. No problem in my book except they should probably remove the traffic lights at either end of that street now. The lights either encouraged it to be a cut through or were added because it was, but in this case, there are not enough residents on that strip versus others to justify one, especially now.
- thebruce87m 3y ago> But I guess that one guy on the side street who was shaking his fist at people speeding past his house is happy now. That’s me. My UK cul-de-sac street is a 20mph limit. It’s a thin street with cars parked on both sides with just enough room to drive down the middle. There are kids and pets. People fly down the street at terrifying speeds, putting on seatbelts, fiddling with their phones and all sorts between two lines of parked cars. My neighbour on one side uses my dipped kerb to mount the pavement at 15mph and drive along the pavement to park outside his own house. My other neighbour has a hedge, such that my son could be running up the drive on to the pavement, where we have taught him it is safe, and my other neighbour could be driving along the pavement and hit him without ever seeing him. People just don’t think.
- CoopaTroopa 3y agoThe street I live on just did this. I live on a residential street one block off of a main road, they added "Road Closed to Thru Traffic" construction barriers to both entrances of my street. They've been there for 2 weeks with no sign of construction.
- tinus_hn 3y agoThis reads like whinery by someone who doesn’t know how navigation apps work. All the big apps have a way to designate streets and places as something they should never route through, either because it would make the app route people over parking lots, or because it is truly a disturbance to the locals. In the case this writer is complaining about it’s probably a one-off event so this wasn’t set up. Big whoop.
- PeterStuer 3y agoThe sinalling and designation must adapt to technological realities. Streets not meant to be used as transit roads should be formally designated as local traffic only. Idealy this should be the default, prohibiting transit passage everywhere except on specially indicated roads.
- iguana_lawyer 3y agoThis article is not well sourced and is inconsistent with lived experience. Ten years ago navigation apps would almost always recommend freeways even when traffic was stalled and there was a faster route. Now I regularly get guided to exits to take routes through residential neighborhoods during rush hour.
- toyg 3y agoEr, that's actually what the article says. Ten years ago routing was done with fixed databases, whereby a "freeway" (motorway) was always deemed faster. Now it's done with live data, so if the freeway is recorded as slow by cars currently there, apps send you through residential routes. This creates problems for the residential areas, effectively scaling up "rat racing" problems to unsustainable levels. The author studies this problem for a living, so I'd be wary of calling them up on receipts.
- moribvdvs 3y agoDefinitely agree that to whatever degree (if at all) vendors are required to work with city planners and transportation networks, it’s not enough. Transportation and logistics are too complex and delicate for the disruption approach of the tech sector and it can severely degrade or even endanger people’s lives. I live on a small side street of an exit just before a horribly designed junction of two highways. A couple years after we moved in, we noticed that suddenly rush hour traffic was overflowing through the exit. Our street isn’t even remotely designed for that kind of traffic. Now we had an endless train of honking, angry drivers that effectively blocked us in our drive way. If someone on our street has an emergency, they’re fucked. For whatever reason, it’s gotten better the past couple years and only pops up when there’s an accident on the interstate. Hoping and praying is a poor mitigation strategy, though.
- friend_and_foe 3y agoI personally get around most of the time without GPS. I'll pull up a map and figure out directions, mapquest style. I think it keeps your brain plastic to navigate the world around you from memory, and I thing using a GPS is unhealthy for all but long distance trips on unfamiliar roads. For those scenarios, I use OSM. I have been a contributor, I love it, it is more accurate than google and I couldn't give a damn about traffic information. I'm fine with the dynamic nature of finding out what traffic is like when I'm on the road, life is boring when experiences are entirely predictable.