I stopped using Waze (I live in Los Angeles) because it would give a slightly faster route with unprotected left turns that was riskier, more stressful, and ultimately not much faster in reality.
I had wondered about that before. My guess is that Google considers Waze and Maps users to be different type of "navigators", with Waze being a self-selecting group of folks who want crazy routes to shave a few seconds here and there, while the Maps users are more mainstream and just want a sensible route with options. So they may have hesitated to give the "crazy" option to them.
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.
I am exactly one of those users which you describe and only use Waze for long trips and Maps for the rest. Waze urban navigation drives me crazy with the route it picks sometimes, hoping of shaving off a few seconds.
Friend of mine lives in South Pasadena. He mentions that since Waze he has a lot more traffic on the road behind his house, just people cutting through to save 30 seconds!
You're right, but I don't think there's any reason for the sarcasm. People are allowed to personally lament actions of others, while fully realizing and even supporting that they are legal. And even hope for circumstances changing, like I'm fully allowed to complain about the rain and wish for sunshine, without someone putting me down with "Oh no! A functioning ecosystem doing its job!".
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.
There are a lot of roads in LA that are gated or just dead end. [1,2,3] They drive me insane. It effectively makes a gated community and I doubt the property tax revenue covers the tax dollars that go into these neighborhoods. Roads are a public good and they should be usable by the public. I am fine with the alternative where we privatize them and let the cost of ownership and maintenance fall on the residents, once they're footing the entire bill they can choose who drives on the roads.
The sarcasm will continue until the NIMBYs improve.
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.
It’s antisocial for someone driving across town to use a road that’s sized for local traffic only. If you’re doing a journey shared by thousands of others you should use the 10^3 capacity road, not the 10^1 capacity road.
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?
> An employee taking beers intended for employees to consume!, right?
In Germany, that is culturally accepted. It even has, as always in German, its own name: "Wegbier" or the pun version "Fuß-Pils" (a play on "athlete's foot").
"City and traffic planning" is a thing. You see, roads that were planned for the vehicle traffic of a neighborhood (=here in Germany, like one car a minute tops or lower) are usually built to lower standards than a road that is planned as a transit route.
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.
Did you know that once upon a time there was no such thing as a speed limit?
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?
They do not seem to. Not for speeding, distracted driving, drunk driving, etc. There’s basically no traffic enforcement here. When was the last time you’ve seen a driver pulled over on a surface street? I think I’ve seen one in the last 10 years.
