Quote:
Originally Posted by rumatt
Another issue I've seen very few people talk about is what it does to small back streets when there's a traffic jam. The other day I was stuck in a giant clusterfuck at the GW bridge. Waze eventually floods all the little side streets in the town with gridlocked cars. When one street fills up with stopped cars, it starts routing people one more block over until that one is clogged up too. And it keeps repeating.
Of course there's nothing preventing some people from driving those streets even without waze, but traffic-aware routing essentially guarantees that the entire grid of side streets becomes gridlocked every time the bridge backs up. The people who live there must be pissed.
I wonder if this will somehow be addressed through regulation... or goodwill from the google overlords. "Gridlocking an entire town is not a valid global routing strategy"
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"Time for some traffic in Fort Lee" ended a political career.
Matt, you make a very good and fair point. I wonder how many of those stuck in the jam you were in, thought about the other side of the coin as you are doing.
I live in Weehawken and while my dead-end is (largely) unscathed, one block away the traffic of Lincoln Tunnel and the waze/google/other gps/traffic reroutes are wreaking havoc. Plenty of towns around here limit certain streets at certain hours to those with resident permits; but that requires hiring and paying for extra traffic cops.