Navigation Apps Turn Some Quiet Neighborhoods into Traffic Nightmares

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.

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.

The best plan for the greater NYC area is: http://iheartmoveny.org/

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.

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.

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.

Time for some traffic problems in Leonia

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.