People would even be allowed to try to effect change. In this case, it would mean weighing saving a likely insignificant amount of time for a subset of people, against residents of the street dealing with constant traffic. What is "fair" depends on the exact circumstances, but taken at face value, I suspect if one were to effect regulation such that speed bumps are added, or through traffic prohibited, or the path being made less convenient, then almost none of the insignificant-time-savers would even notice much. They'd take the new suggested route and be likely just as happy.

The place where I work has a fridge full of beers. Every so often I see someone stick a couple in their bag, on their way home. Oh no! An employee taking beers intended for employees to consume!, right?

I blame the parents.

Many public residential streets are not designed for heavy traffic use. I don't think it's unreasonable for local residents to be upset by the noise and congestion of people taking a shortcut off the highway to cut 30 seconds off their travel time.

Do you think we should return to those good old days? Or is there perhaps an argument to be made that new technologies can lead to suboptimal outcomes when operated within the bounds of regulations that didn't (and couldn't reasonably have been expected to) anticipate their development?

The asphalt layers are thinner, ground support is spec'd for low and moderate traffic... that means that should such a road be subject to unplanned amounts of traffic, the roads will degrade way faster, particularly if heavy goods traffic comes into play.

Another thing, I suspect there's a significant resource cost in constantly re-evaluating these few-second saving opportunities that may not scale well to the size of Map's user base. Could be wrong here.

This results in 5-10 semis getting stuck every year. There is nothing that google is willing to do to help the state out. The state has put up signage telling drivers their GPS is wrong, and they ignore it.