The War on Waze
For city planners, there&#x27;s a natural hierarchy of roads: limited-access freeways, arterials, collectors, and residential streets. Moving high volumes of cars is intended to use arterials and freeways, whereas collectors and residential streets are deliberately designed for lower speeds as they may have a higher likelihood of pedestrians randomly entering the street (the child racing after his ball, to use the proverbial example).<p>In a nutshell, the problem with Waze is that it encourages drivers to shift from arterials to collector roads, where they very often proceed to drive in flagrant violation of safety standards. Getting drivers to not do that is challenging (and this problem predates Waze). Speed bumps don&#x27;t meaningfully slow people down. Even prohibiting the through movement in a T intersection by means of an island doesn&#x27;t work--people will happily drive over the curb to do so. By routing people down roads that are not designed for this traffic, Waze is pretty close to being complicit in these safety violations.<p>The proximate cause of this furor is that there is a street in LA that is too steep to be safe for through traffic, yet Waze is happily routing people along the street. Waze&#x27;s response is, effectively, it&#x27;s legal for through traffic, so Waze doesn&#x27;t have to do anything, with the underlying reasoning being that it doesn&#x27;t want to have to deal with everyone demanding special treatment.<p>Waze&#x27;s attitude is, quite frankly, irresponsible. What they could do--and should be doing--is to look at potential factors that impact safety and update they app to not route people on roads that are clearly unsafe (Google&#x27;s maps already have the ability to report grade on roads, for example). In fact, that&#x27;s what the LA council is basically doing: they&#x27;re looking to see if Waze could be doing more, and in the likely case they find that Waze is indeed not doing enough, finding some mechanism to compel Waze to do more.<p>The other element in play here is a complete about congestion. The truth is... you can&#x27;t fix congestion. In transportation theory, there&#x27;s an element called induced demand: if travel time improves in a corridor, then that induces people to take extra trips, often returning it fairly quickly to the same level of congestion. What many cities have realized is that trying to provide sufficient road capacity to meet demand is a game lost before they&#x27;ve even begun, and instead focused their efforts on trying to coax better utilization of current corridors (single-occupant vehicles on roads are basically the lowest-throughput transportation measures devised, except for Elon Musk&#x27;s proposals which somehow manage to be even worse).