
Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war, again. Guess who’s winning? - cgtyoder
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/traffic-weary-homeowners-and-waze-are-at-war-again-guess-whos-winning/2016/06/05/c466df46-299d-11e6-b989-4e5479715b54_story.html
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smashd
One could argue that Waze is virtually "adding lanes to the road" by finding
all these alternate routes. Yet you'll see a lot of articles that claim that
adding lanes just encourages more people to drive, which is nice for those
people but does not improve congestion issues overall. Will this relationship
also hold true with Waze over the long term?

If it does, Waze isn't really adding any long-term benefit to a city's traffic
problem. It's playing a (arguably) zero-sum game with convenience, adding it
to some people's lives and removing it from others. Waze users gain the
convenience of driving in scenarios where they normally wouldn't, but the
extra drivers are an inconvenience to residents of affected streets and city
planners.

Measuring this effect sounds difficult because of extra distribution of the
traffic, although I suppose you could come up with a "Waze factor" to estimate
total traffic based solely on numbers from major roads. I'm going to guess
that this work will fall on city planners and traffic engineers, not Waze.

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manicdee
Nobody, is the answer. Waze is just looking for routes without paying
attention to safety or community wishes. Drivers are blindly following
directions without consideration. Calm neighbourhoods are resorting to data
vandalism. Councils are resorting to reducing the serviceability of roads.

Nobody is looking like a winner in this scenario.

Perhaps if Waze wasn't trying to route peak hour traffic through single lane
residential streets it would be a different story.

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smashd
There's one winner - Waze/Google. They're collecting all sorts of juicy data
from this app.

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lwhalen
Tough noogies, public roads are public roads.

