I liked Waze when it was suggesting seemingly out of the way secondary and tertiary routes, that had less stop and go traffic. But the deep dive into neighborhoods I found offensive, and inconvenient (stick shift, stop signs every block). So I removed Waze from my phone.
And now Google Maps has starting doing it. They have an avoid highways option, now they need an avoid neighborhoods option.
They are doing “it” because often, in places like LA where people have refused to fund public transport or more roads or tunnels or anything, it can be the difference between a 40 minute drive/ride to LAX and a 2 hour one.
Can’t speak for your case, but in general Google Maps and Apple Maps include real-time traffic into travel time and suggest alternative routes, even through seemingly slow areas, if they are estimated to be faster than the original congested high speed route.
The only real solution is a region-wide implementation of congestion pricing, which will cause the main arteries to flow freely, and mean that no one will try to get around them.
Solutions need to be specific to each congestion point.
For example a light near my house recently got changed from both-ways green to green on each side sequentially.
There is a private school campus near which resulted in lots of morning traffic but after the light sequence change the traffic considerably reduced (throughout same but latency is worse) mainly because apps routed to compensate for the new light sequence.
> only real solution is a region-wide implementation of congestion pricing...
Interesting, I’d never really thought of it but this would actually work with self-driving fleets that could take advantage of both time of day congestion charges and billing to allow the user flexibility in travel time. Hmm...
Everyone has a fantastic solution to the problem they perceive but it’s more complicated than that.
Ultimately people need to drive less, either because they live close to their jobs, because they use public transit or a bike, because they work from home or any other reason.
The problem is how to get people to do that. It certainly won’t be by easing congestion because that has the opposite effect. Short term gains because moving cars pollute less but long term loss because less congestion causes more traffic.
Some quick googling suggests that while people often start putting fake accidents on Waze, it also tries to detect people who are faking it and starts ignoring you.
I guess the next step is to build a tool that repeatedly creates fake Waze accounts and uses them to report fake accidents in the residential streets that Waze is turning into major commuting roads.
Or maybe the next step is to abandon the whole "people live three towns over from their day job and drive for a half hour" thing. It's pretty horrible and increases misery for a ton of people. Sadly, America's been building suburbs for like sixty years now, changing this is gonna take a lot of time.
I don't believe OP was implying that at all. Seems more like OP is opining on the rather large barrier some people have to living where they work vs. being forced to commute.
Some folks end up in a situation where they can't afford to move (or, probably more commonly, live) closer to their job, but can't find a well-paying enough job in their own town to survive their either.
If you're commuting and can't afford to live in the city to which you commute, you're being paid below market rate. Probably well below. It's very easy for companies to exploit that to their benefit, and much to the detriment of their employees.
I love Waze and I never drive without it. Sure driving through neighborhoods at 25mph can be annoying at times, but the forward-looking incident and calamity avoidance mechanism is worth it. Not to mention police.
Some thoughts:
1. I would pay Waze a monthly fee to get premium routes, and
2. Pay an additional fee to avoid police activity.
If you can't get out of your own driveway into crawling traffic within a minute or two, then you simply must learn to take some control and be a bit aggressive.
I started avoiding using google to navigate after the second time it turned me into a jerk.
For a particularly egregious example, CA17 between los gatos and santa cruz frequently gets congested. The congestion appears to arise due to the capacity limits of the segment going over the mountain-- there is no simple alternative route around that.
For some inexplicable reason google directs a dense conga line of cars off the highway, through a quiet residential neighborhood in los gatos and right back onto the highway. The returning cars merge in just a half dozen cars ahead of cars not following google.
Because the reroute just jumped the queue a bit and didn't do anything about the actual bottleneck no good was done by the reroute, the only thing that was accomplished was making a surrounding neighborhood less safe and pleasant.
I guess this is the kind of socially irresponsible behavior we should expect from our new machine overlords at google. I avoid using their navigation solutions, and when I can't I at least try to ignore their reroutes since you can't tell when they're just telling you to make your trip seconds faster at an extreme expense to others.
17 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 29.9 ms ] threadAnd now Google Maps has starting doing it. They have an avoid highways option, now they need an avoid neighborhoods option.
The best plan for the greater NYC area is: http://iheartmoveny.org/
For example a light near my house recently got changed from both-ways green to green on each side sequentially.
There is a private school campus near which resulted in lots of morning traffic but after the light sequence change the traffic considerably reduced (throughout same but latency is worse) mainly because apps routed to compensate for the new light sequence.
Interesting, I’d never really thought of it but this would actually work with self-driving fleets that could take advantage of both time of day congestion charges and billing to allow the user flexibility in travel time. Hmm...
Ultimately people need to drive less, either because they live close to their jobs, because they use public transit or a bike, because they work from home or any other reason.
The problem is how to get people to do that. It certainly won’t be by easing congestion because that has the opposite effect. Short term gains because moving cars pollute less but long term loss because less congestion causes more traffic.
I guess the next step is to build a tool that repeatedly creates fake Waze accounts and uses them to report fake accidents in the residential streets that Waze is turning into major commuting roads.
Or maybe the next step is to abandon the whole "people live three towns over from their day job and drive for a half hour" thing. It's pretty horrible and increases misery for a ton of people. Sadly, America's been building suburbs for like sixty years now, changing this is gonna take a lot of time.
Some folks end up in a situation where they can't afford to move (or, probably more commonly, live) closer to their job, but can't find a well-paying enough job in their own town to survive their either.
If you're commuting and can't afford to live in the city to which you commute, you're being paid below market rate. Probably well below. It's very easy for companies to exploit that to their benefit, and much to the detriment of their employees.
Some thoughts:
1. I would pay Waze a monthly fee to get premium routes, and
2. Pay an additional fee to avoid police activity.
For a particularly egregious example, CA17 between los gatos and santa cruz frequently gets congested. The congestion appears to arise due to the capacity limits of the segment going over the mountain-- there is no simple alternative route around that.
For some inexplicable reason google directs a dense conga line of cars off the highway, through a quiet residential neighborhood in los gatos and right back onto the highway. The returning cars merge in just a half dozen cars ahead of cars not following google.
Because the reroute just jumped the queue a bit and didn't do anything about the actual bottleneck no good was done by the reroute, the only thing that was accomplished was making a surrounding neighborhood less safe and pleasant.
I guess this is the kind of socially irresponsible behavior we should expect from our new machine overlords at google. I avoid using their navigation solutions, and when I can't I at least try to ignore their reroutes since you can't tell when they're just telling you to make your trip seconds faster at an extreme expense to others.