Mapping Apps Like Waze, Google Maps, and Apple Maps May Make Traffic Conditions Worse in Some Areas, New Research Suggests (theatlantic.com) 283
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.
Selfishness? (Score:5, Insightful)
[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.
Re:Selfishness? (Score:5, Informative)
"Selfnishness" means to optimize for themselves. It's a well established term in economics, biology, etc., without a moral subtext
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Re: Selfishness? (Score:3, Informative)
That's your own psychological problem
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Re: Selfishness? (Score:3)
At some point, more capacity doesn't solve anything. Adding more lanes to fix a traffic problem becomes like buying a bigger belt to fix a weight problem.
If a road becomes less congested, the advantage will be arbitraged away as people use it as an alternate route and people moving further away for better real estate deals only that are now worth the commute.
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Selfishness? Just because people are using the information that's available to them?
Yes. The fact you can (a) physically do something and (b) it's not illegal does not make it selfish.
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.
Oh I see, you think you're "smart" and "not a sheep" because you managed to download an app. You also like to lord it over th
Re:Selfishness? (Score:5, Interesting)
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It seems pretty selfish... I'm guessing most of these drivers benefiting from these apps would not be happy if traffic outside their front door massively increased, but are willing to do the same to other people.
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the problem we have at the moment is that the software tools need to evolve to a point where they can dynamically determine the optimum number of cars to direct off a congested highway to achieve the most efficient overall flow.
So you've never met a person before in your life?
I have, and I can tell you that once the software starts doing this, someone will write software to get them to where they want to go as quickly as possible, and then everyone will use that software instead.
People fully and lovingly embrace the tragedy of the commons. That's what makes it so tragic.
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Re:Selfishness? (Score:5, Interesting)
The article contradicts much of the summary:
And
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:Selfishness? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, what's madness is you taking such offense to being called selfish.
Most people, me included, mainly use Waze/Google Maps in a selfish manner to get to your destination quicker.
We're not thinking about overall traffic flow....
LifeProTip... the most effective way to deal with someone who says you're selfish... is to say... I am... now what.
We're all selfish. Selfishness taken too far can be a problem. I wouldn't consider this a case of being selfish taken too far though.
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Well yes, actually. Let's go back a few years. About 20 years to be exact. In a city on the other side of the world to most of the USA. We had a power cut. City wide. In winter. For two days straight.
I've never gotten to work faster. Without traffic lights, people gave way. Without the enforced controls that those traffic lights provide, every.single.driver assessed the immediate (visual range) traffic conditions and
Re:Selfishness? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Since the problem is massive congestion on our roadways, the problem to solve is capacity, which is sometimes difficult to budget based on estimated future use. And of course you can't forget about the greed and corruption within construction. Gotta keep pockets lined in perpetuity with never-ending maintenance and expansion.
I'm not saying that building more roads is the solution. Lots of governments are about to go bankrupt on road maintenance alone.
Oh, they've solved that whole budget thing around me. Every new road being built is a fucking toll road. Problem solved.
However I think technology can save us here.
There was hardly any road traffic last week when kids were on spring break, proving just how much of an impact school alone can be with congestion. We have high-speed internet at home, inexpensive VPN technology, and cloud collaboration. Companies have the capacity to support remote work. They refuse to do so. Same goes with high school. Millions could be saved if we converted high-school to virtual school.
We have the technology already today to fix the congestion problem. The real problem is ignorance and refusal to embrace it.
Re:Selfishness? (Score:5, Insightful)
This would be a BAD idea....
Going to school at a kid is a way to socialize them...give them the tools they need to interact with others....to create relationships, hell, to learn how to get laid!!!
Kids today are already being more and more isolated due in large part to them not playing outside as much as kids, and with nothing but social apps and texting as means to connect with others, rather than talking in person.
If you didn't throw them together physically in the school systems, you're exacerbate a problem we're already seeing that is having a harmful effect on the younger generations that don't have good real life, in person social skills.
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There was hardly any road traffic last week when kids were on spring break, proving just how much of an impact school alone can be with congestion. We have high-speed internet at home, inexpensive VPN technology, and cloud collaboration.
Well, sure, but "walking out" of your own home all by yourself to make some political point would hardly be as exciting ...
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Remote work isn't all it's cracked up to be. Or, rather, maybe it works well for some work styles and personality types. But it definitely does not work for everyone.
I had a job a while back where the company closed it's office in the city and put those of up who didn't want to relocate (and take a pay cut) on full-time work from home. It was nice at first. No commute, no rush, more time with the dogs. over time I put in the investment in extra monitors to match the office and a desk that was better fo
Re:Selfishness? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Not quite. It's a problem that isn't solvable by some government design, but only solvable through some very strict control of actions (road rules and we all love those).
Consider someone who's unhappy that the traffic is doing 50 in a 60 zone and there's a free lane to the left that is ending. He jumps in, goes to the front and then merges back. Selfishness for using the infrastructure when what he has done is cause a brake-light wave to propagate through the traffic behind him making it worse.
The same applies to short-cutting. Taking one of those shortcuts often may end you on a sensor light that otherwise wouldn't impede traffic. The solution to that is either to put in dead-end streets (piss off everyone) or put in place "local traffic only" rules (piss off people who are anti-government and think just because they pay taxes they can do what they want).
It is selfish. We are selfish.
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contrary to you belief that last minute mergers are asshats (and some may be) but zipper merging is actually more effective.
Zipper merging is effectively using both lanes until reaching the obstruction, then merging (calmly) into the open lane
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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There are several ways to improve street traffic via government design.
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Oh don't worry, governments will react. People use residential areas for through-traffic? No problem, let's make a 10mph speed limit with 4-way-stops at every intersection, huge speed bumps every other yards and whatever else is necessary to make using them as inconvenient as possible.
You don't think that they will actually solve the problem, do you?
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In other words (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks to Waze, Dr. Bayen’s formerly uncongested secret route into work is now full of cars.
Re:In other words (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't even need to be that. It could be his own street, in small quiet suburbia, once safe to let your kids run around on has now turned into a highway. Google tells me to do just that every day, rather than drive the 700m further to go down the highway it takes me through a school zone where I can run slalom between cars and kids.
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It's more than just one person getting to work a little more slowly. The road system is designed to manage traffic, for the benefit of more than just the drivers. People living in residential areas with children and pets, road surfaces that are not suitable for heavy use, keeping pollution away from more sensitive areas, preventing jams building up earlier so that people who come a bit later (e.g. bringing the kids to school) can get in etc.
The majority of drivers used to follow the signs and other features
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Spreading traffic (Score:5, Insightful)
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The solution proposed by *Bayer* is aspirin.
Or in these days of opiate overprescription where people want something a little stronger, Bayer Heroin(TM).
it's a software bug (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Traffic (Score:2)
I have a very long rant about town-planning and road infrastructure. Don't make me start it.
But there are two options - allow or penalise. If you need that amount of traffic to get to a place, you need a road, and side-roads, and feeder-roads and sink-roads that can take the capacity PLUS MORE.
If you don't WANT that amount of traffic then you have to penalise it. Tolls. Prohibitions. One way systems. Or... yes... just making it traffic-heavy. Literally traffic is it's own limiter - if it takes you an
Re:Traffic (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Planners have started to take notoce (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Theory: see above
Practice: Planners will see where people go to escape the "planned" routes and turn through-roads into dead ends and what cannot be corked up gets slowed down with speed limits around walking speed and speed bumps with the size of mountains.
I think these stories are related (Score:2)
https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
Technology is part of the solution (Score:2)
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Self-driving tech means trucks will drive normal routes 24 hours / day
Nope. Our city is in the middle of promoting high density urban villages. With condos and apartments on the upper floors and businesses on the street. You start making deliveries at 2AM and residents will burn your trucks to the ground.
Google maps (Score:2)
Certainly contributes to angry driving.
Two types of problems (Score:2)
I can see two types of problems which do not require much investigation to know they exist.
One is the optimal case where information is realtime and possibly even anticipates group movement: if everyone uses one of these realtime routing apps, then traffic spreads out. It will be faster but it will use all the available routes. The other people, including the people trying to manage traffic and who want to strictly guide it along the path they want, simply don't like that.
A second is that there is no optima
Douglas, where art thou? (Score:2)
Who else saw this and immediately remembered the line about "but because everyone else was also trying to push forwards through the crowd"?
Didn't we have that already several times? (Score:2)
I remember reading the same crap for several years now.
In Germany in some streets, where traffic is impossible, neighbors put all their old cellphones in the mailbox (near the street) and claim there's a complete traffic stop, to try to move the traffic to another neighborhood, which, I'm sure, does the very same thing.
Ever watch a flock of birds? (Score:2)
City planners are just lazy asshats (Score:2)
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One of the few roads from 1924 is still present totally unchanged.
Just guessing here. But that 1924 road has residents and businesses around it since .... 1924. All who have a vested interest in not having their neighborhood dug up to accommodate more outside traffic. Not that this is a good thing. Back in 1924, the gas station (for example) wanted to be on the street corner. For more traffic. But smarter developers (and gas station customers) have since realized that corner lots are absolute shit when it comes to access. The only people who aren't smart are the people ha
Re:Fuck California and its "wisdom". (Score:5, Interesting)
Multiple reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
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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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).
The issue I have with that is that relies on 4 different people using the car at different times. In reality it doesn't work that way as people tend to work 9 to 5 and the problem with congestion isn't the number of registered cars, it's the number of cars at use at the same time during peak hours. Autonomous cars wont fix that because the same number of people will need to be going at the same time. Autonomous cars will not reduce congestion for this reason, also people don't like sharing cars. I know its
Re: Multiple reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
Overall conditions will inherently get WORSE as time optimized routing increases. If my app drives my car ten miles farther to avoid a constant traffic snarl that takes 12 minutes to ge through, i save two minutes. My car drives another ten miles. I am disrupting traffic at my usual places plus ten miles of circuitous but time optimal for me. Maybe i make a hundred people one second slower for each extra mile i drive. That's a thousand people seconds. Which means my saving two minutes just cost you sixteen minutes if you are the designated scape goat of the day. You will then do the same to me and a thousand others. Net result, we have three traffic snarls and but 45 mins getting through them while driving twice as far.
Why?
Bc f u i got mine. Even if i no longer do a year later bc everyone else does the same tragedy of the commons shit.
Road network capacity is vehicles over time.
If you spend 2 minutes less on the road then you are taking less road capacity. Even if you add to congestion elsewhere, you are reducing congestion on your normal route, so you are not adding to overall congestion.
Unless you decide to engage in frequent behaviors that cause hard breaking for other vehicles (ie cutting people off) only on alternate routes and not on your main route, taking a longer but faster route should reduce overall congestion and help everyone get to their destinations faster.
As a 'good' alternate route is one that has little or no congestion, the preferred scenario of taking an alternate route should not involve additional congestion for anyone because you would want to select a route that is far enough below capacity that it is not congested to get the best speed.
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It's not that simple, at all.
There is the list of available *reasonable routes*, the capacity of those routes, normalized event cycles (go to work, come home on the 9/5 basis), aperodic events (accidents, POTUS motorcade, public safety/fire events, ducks crossing the road, etc) having a quotient of inputs to a specific route under consideration (congestion, events as above, timing of traffic signals), weather, truck vs auto traffic, road construction/cone-zones, and more.
If an app shows only a static route,
Re: Multiple reasons (Score:3)
From what I've read, the big problem in Florida used to be the way road construction was funded. If a road had ${n} budgeted and a timeline of ${m} months, exactly ${n}/${m} would be doled out every month, regardless of what was actually being DONE that month. So contractors would put up barricades to show "due diligence", start cashing checks, then wait until enough subsequent checks were deposited to pay for the equipment they'd have to lease & the initial crew. From that point, the remainder of the p
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Not necessarily. Here in the UK there are two major motorways which Waze will happily route you off one onto a reasonably quiet residential road to join up with the other.
The alternative would just be to stick on the first motorway and switch to the second motorway. However t
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Lack of Experience. (Score:2)
Yes, the boy is a genius (in his own mind).
Of course, he seems to have forgotten that just perhaps what these things are doing, as most of them are now traffic sensitive, is maximizing the throughput of the ENTIRE roading system.
What he actually seems to have his proverbial panties in a twist about is 'we are not following the rules the traffic planners pre-decided for us, oh no!'
I am imaging that he thinks of himself as one of those planners, and how DARE us unwashed heathens not just follow the routes our
Re:Lack of Experience. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Re: Lack of Experience. (Score:2)
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In the UK, it's because we privatised them and expect them to run at a profit. This means that the fairs go up and so fewer people ride them. Then they become less frequent, and so fewer people ride them. Eventually they reach an equilibrium where only people that can't afford any of the alternatives take them. Then people complain that they would take the bus, if only they run more frequently and weren't so expensive.
Every time someone takes a bus instead of driving, that's less traffic, less air po
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So you haven't tried to ride a bus in a US city in a decade?
Most metro areas that are a couple hundred thousand people and up now have realtime apps for their bus systems. Buses have GPS on them, and you get to-the-minute status updates of when they will arrive. And full system maps to show you where they go.
Have you never used google maps?
You can try it right now. Navigate to a metro area, choose Directions, click your start and end locations, and select the Transit option. You'll be given all of the busin
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Interesting I just tried it. So for me in the NW part of what is considered to be the core of the city, I can drive downtown in 12 minutes or take buses and get there in an hour and 19 minutes. Or I could just walk and take 2 1/2 hours. Riding a bike gets me there in about an hour. I did see an article where Arlington TX was dumping its buses and switching to on demand mini-vans at 3 bucks/ride. They claimed it was cheaper for the city than buses. I think possibly a great idea, but I wonder if demand will s
Re:Lack of Experience. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Nerds and buses (Score:3)
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.
re: proper based on what criteria? (Score:3)
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
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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.
Yes, there are a few places in the center of large cities where there are enough office jobs to make public transportation work (New York and Washington DC here in the US are good examples). But it doesn't work when the jobs are spread out like most US cities.
Try counting the number of people transported by buses sometime; unless the buses are running a few seconds apart they will never move more people that a stream of cars.
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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).
No, he doesn't have it all wrong.
First of all, our population would be flat or falling if we stopped unnecessary immigration, but I digress ... adding more roads doesn't magically make more people and cars appear. (If they do, it's because you were artificially holding road capacity down previously.)
Google Maps doesn't route me through some neighborhood unless the main thoroughfares are insanely congested or blocked by accidents. Why would it?
If your bucolic streets are somehow faster than the highway, t
I challenge the notion that buses are better (Score:2)
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And if there's no law against flying my drone near an airport I damn well may do it.
Net result: Because some asshats did just that, we now have laws concerning drones that pretty much make them useless. So keep using the backstreets, it's your right, right? At least until you use one in front of some politician's home, then you'll suddenly see them being regulated as fuck.
Thanks, asshole.
Re:Lack of Experience. (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Re:Lack of Experience. (Score:5, Interesting)
A quick google search turns up lots of stores and people complaining about this.
http://kalw.org/post/driving-a... [kalw.org]
https://www.waze.com/forum/vie... [waze.com]
http://www.latimes.com/opinion... [latimes.com]
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
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Hell, this isn't the first time I've read about this here. :-)
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
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You do realize that the "possessive" formation in English is used for more than just ownership, yes? It also refers to simple possession without ownership, and can even be used to signify proximity or relation to the subject. Thus, "my east", "my street", etc.
I will now stop responding to ACs for some indeterminate time while I study the lack of snow removal on "my" street.
Re: Lack of Experience. (Score:3)
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
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Easy, road humps. They do it in Austin on many roads. It discourages anyone from using the road unless they absolutely have to. Personally I think it is a terrible idea. They cost a fortune to put in and are the equivalent of a paid pothole.
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A second option that they're using around here are mini traffic circles. They take every couple of suburban neighborhood intersections, widen them a little, and plant a little 10' diameter garden in the middle of the road. It makes it almost impossible for large vehicles to use the roads, and since the turn is so tight, you need to slow down to like 10 mph to get around them.
They're a bit of a pain, but I like them better than the stupid road humps.
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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 colle
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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.
Actually those two are backwards, at least according to what I've read about Waze. They claim they primarily use user data to monitor vehicle speed and when it sees users slowing down in a particular area it assumes there is traffic and reroutes other users around the traffic. Also allows users to enter stopped vehicles and even police speed traps which has been pretty accurate in my experience.
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I am imaging that he thinks of himself as one of those planners, and how DARE us unwashed heathens not just follow the routes our betters decide for us.
Um huh. Someone who is demanding to have some mythical fastest possible route, and diverts to my 25 mph street is not likely to be going 25 miles per hour. We've had a few of your entitled types who have tried to zip down our street at 90 (your 70 mph freeway speed plus the 20 for principle and getting away from those other drivers you consider assholes.
Its quite enjoyable as we watch our local boys busting them. The less insane ones, well let's just say our neighborhood understands parallel construction
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Don't blame the satnav for that, but the map providers. A lot of maps miss the informations about the category of the road, max speed, limitations (height because of a bridge, max wheight for lorries...).
An Easy and Logical solution (Score:2)
program things to assume worst case when the info is missing (so if the info is missing assume that the road is a 400 YO cobblestone path fit for horse carts only).
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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 w
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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.
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
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the misbegotten idea that people can actually zipper merge.
Maybe you can't get your Prius up to highway speed on a short metered on-ramp. But in my Porsche, it's just more fun.
Traffic planners have just inadvertently boosted the market demand for Dodge Challenger SRTs.