Waze error leaves São Paulo traffic (even more) congested | Hacker News Reader

Waze error leaves São Paulo traffic (even more) congested

translate.google.com

38 pointsdakial133 comments

I have thought about the impact that ubiquitous apps like Google Maps or Waze might have on the real world and people who aren't necessarily tapping into that space. It first came about when Google Maps directed me along a side street that paralleled a major thoroughfare. It was very residential, lots of stop signs and street parking, whereas the thoroughfare was all commercial with decent speed but some traffic lights. The residential route probably was marginally faster, but I took it at the expense of the residents who wanted/deserved a quiet and slow street. Could you imagine if suddenly the Google Maps algorithm decides that your quiet street is the best route to get across town? Now there are a thousand more cars and hurried ride shares traveling in front of your house, rolling through stop signs, all because an opaque and stoic algorithm has decided so. There is no social recourse. There is no support line. You can't go the the city council to get anything done about it. What a twist of fate.

But then then Google Maps and Waze will be able to see the rise in traffic along those routes and not recommend those routes to commuters during certain hours. Additionally, you can usually request the municipal govt monitor the road and install speed bumps. Commuters used to always drive down my parent's street after a new entrance to a state highway was built. Some fuddyduddies didn't like it so they had the road monitored (to see that there was a lot of traffic that was over the speed limit) and had speed bumps installed. Barely anyone but locals drive down that road now.

True, but this is no difference than when there is a major incident (e.g. construction) on the thoroughfare and the surrounding quiet streets become the detour. Unless the algorithm mistakenly makes it a permanent preference.

Aside: it's been a while since I've used google's translation service. If I hadn't seen "translate.google.com" in the HN headline I think I'd have assumed that this was written originally in English. There are a couple of non-idiomatic translations that I would've attributed to "probably written by a non-native speaker."

I've never used translate.google.com for Portuguese before, so it's possible that they do better on this language than others. But in any case, it's worth some praise for a superior service. Well done, GOOG.

I've seen stunning improvements in Google Translate in the last couple years.

Maybe it's their move from phrase-based machine translation to neural machine translation.

https://research.googleblog.com/2016/09/a-neural-network-for...

Yeah, that was amazing.

Brazilian from Sao Paulo speaking...

This is the tip of the iceberg. Waze (and google maps) are wrongly conducting people to most dangerous slums (PTBR: favelas) and some people already died following this apps.

Source: Death #1 - http://g1.globo.com/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2015/10/mulher-mo...

Source: Death #2 - http://dc.clicrbs.com.br/sc/noticias/noticia/2017/01/turista...

Waze detoured me onto some backroads while traveling I40 through Tennessee for no apparent reason a few weeks ago. I checked with Google Maps and Apple Maps and neither of them took me off I40. It was ok though, was getting sleepy and the twisty backroads going up to NC woke me up and put a smile on my face.

I stopped using Waze last year after it started consistently giving me bad directions that would add 30-60 minutes to my commute. After a few weeks of that, I just gave up. Before that, it would periodically give me bad directions and I assumed that it was sending me on crazy routes because it didn't have any recent data and it needed a victim to check the traffic.

The time it sent me along a street with 2 school zones during bus time was the worst, tho.

What really drives me nutty is when they have a route that goes from A->B->C->D->E and and you can see on the screen A->B->C on the screen. It shows an alternate route from A->B1->C that takes 30 minutes longer. This is the route you'd prefer to take, but you figure there must be traffic, so you stay on the crap route.

But what it's actually done is made a route from A->B1->C->D1->E. The A->B1->C and A->B->C routes are actually similar travel times, it's the C->D1->E route that takes the extra half hour.

This happens way too often in GMaps

In the early days of the iPhone, I had some software that kept offline maps (xGPS, I think) to save on bandwidth and in case you were out of the service area. Anyway, I had a similar experience driving from LA up to near San Luis Obispo. It took me off US101 and up the San Marcos Pass Rd IIRC, and potentially other roads. That was a beautiful drive through hills and vinyards. No idea why it decided to do that, but I'm glad it did!

Sometimes I wonder if Waze sends you a weird way just to test the route to see how it compares. If it's faster, it'll send more people that way. If it's not, it won't suggest it. But someone has to be the Guinea pig the first time.

It might have been okay but yeesh I hate that navigation apps do this.

They will randomly reroute you through a labrynth to save you a minute. Happened to me all the time when I lived in Dc/Nova and I learned not to listen to the app

With all honest Waze works well in the city, but when I'm goint in a long travel I still prefer trusting my old garmin gps unit.

I usually trust Google Maps to give me the standard way to get somewhere that I've never been to or know anything about, no weird shortcuts or crazy backroads. I use Waze when I'm trying to get somewhere that I already know the general direction and highways I should take but want the quicker backroads and crazy shortcuts.

Something similar once happened in Israel. A major freeway was blocked due to construction work, and Waze routed everyone through it as it free of traffic.

Caused a terrible jam, but as others mentioned here -- Waze's shortcomings are not even close to it's benefits.

It's kind of insane to think a company can do this to an end-user without really having any repercussions / not having a direct phone-line to reach out to when this happens. I guess that's what happens when the product is free.

A tool like Waze has saved countless more time than it costs when it has an error. Seeking punishment is similar to self driving cars. Once we have the first inevitable death due to malfunction, do we ban the technology? That traffic deaths are down 10,000% across the board should be factored in, nothing is *perfect.

I'm not saying we ban anything and acknowledge that it's an insanely useful tool. It's absolutely necessary for companies to move fast with imperfect technologies to break new grounds then iterate.

I just think it's a kind of crazy there's no one to reach out to directly if there are any negative actions that happen.

Reach out to what end?

Say there was a customer support number you could call. What happens when you call them? You complain for a bit and feel placated?

If I were the product manager in charge of Waze, I would appreciate the user feedback so that we could work on improving. In this case, they may have automatically detected this issue, but it is always good to hear from customers/users, and have the opportunity to apologize when you let them down.

You use the term 'repercussions', which usually connotes punishment or negative consequences.

Should there be no negative consequences?

I can't think of any that would be appropriate in this situation. Other than maybe answering an email or chat message from the user and making a bug report to follow up on- can you?

EDIT: Actually, I did think of one- bad press, such as this article.... if it happens too often, eventually people will switch to better apps. But you said there were no repercussions- so you weren't counting the bad press, anyway.

What I'm actually surprised is how well google translated the text from portuguese to english.

They really came a long way.

Lately, when stuck in traffic, I've been thinking if there's a scenario where the behaviour of a bunch of people using traffic-aware routing can cause worse delays than usual for some commuters. If the response of the system (drivers) was instantaneous, you could make the argument that this is not possible, but because it is not this might look like a classic case of a closed-loop control system failing or becoming unstable due to sensing delay.

Trivial example I came up with: an accident on a major highway causes routing software to redirect thousands of drivers to a minor side road at around the same time. Once the drivers are committed to the detour, it's too late for the software to correct its advice as the side road gets clogged with the influx of traffic, and those who chose to take the side road end up in a situation that's worse than the one they started in.

This happened to me on a road trip. A traffic jam on a highway caused a large amount of cars to be re-routed onto a route made up of local roads. Unfortunately, a small bridge along that local route was closed for construction, so all of the re-routed cars were being funnelled into a narrow dead-end. It was difficult for cars to turn around because the long line of cars couldn't effectively reverse to make space. It was a long time before I made it back to the highway and was able to re-enter the original traffic jam I was avoiding.

Exactly this happened to me returning from an eclipse-watching destination this summer. Major highway was terribly clogged, so it routed thousands of us to a side road, which turned out to be much, much worse. It sucked. Took us five hours to do a two-hour drive. People who stayed on the highway got there in 3-4.

That being said, every single other time Waze has routed me off the highway unexpectedly, it's been a godsend.

Thankfully most people don't currently use Google maps for their daily commute. This will be a problem with self driving cars if people aren't allowed to choose their own route.

Unless google factors this in and shards traffic appropriately over multiple routes?

This has the feeling of a hard problem because it involves a distributed system combined with human behaviour.

I’m really impressed by the translation quality here.

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