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Quote of the Week

“But now online navigation apps are in charge, and they’re causing more problems than they solve. The apps are typically optimized to keep an individual driver’s travel time as short as possible; they don’t care whether the residential streets can absorb the traffic or whether motorists who show up in unexpected places may compromise safety.”

Jane Macfarlane in IEEE Spectrum discussing the problem with navigation apps and why they are in many ways making traffic worse, not better.

19 Sep 2019 | 15:00 GMT
Your Navigation App Is Making Traffic Unmanageable
The proliferation of apps like Waze, Apple Maps, and Google Maps is causing chaos



By Jane Macfarlane

Miguel Street is a winding, narrow route through the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco. Until a few years ago, only those living along the road traveled it, and they understood its challenges well. Now it’s packed with cars that use it as a shortcut from congested Mission Street to heavily traveled Market Street. Residents must struggle to get to their homes, and accidents are a daily occurrence.

The problem began when smartphone apps like Waze, Apple Maps, and Google Maps came into widespread use, offering drivers real-time routing around traffic tie-ups. An estimated 1 billion drivers worldwide use such apps.

Today, traffic jams are popping up unexpectedly in previously quiet neighborhoods around the country and the world. Along Adams Street, in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester, residents complain of speeding vehicles at rush hour, many with drivers who stare down at their phones to determine their next maneuver. London shortcuts, once a secret of black-cab drivers, are now overrun with app users. Israel was one of the first to feel the pain because Waze was founded there; it quickly caused such havoc that a resident of the Herzliya Bet neighborhood sued the company.

The problem is getting worse. City planners around the world have predicted traffic on the basis of residential density, anticipating that a certain amount of real-time changes will be necessary in particular circumstances. To handle those changes, they have installed tools like stoplights and metering lights, embedded loop sensors, variable message signs, radio transmissions, and dial-in messaging systems. For particularly tricky situations—an obstruction, event, or emergency—city managers sometimes dispatch a human being to direct traffic.

But now online navigation apps are in charge, and they’re causing more problems than they solve. The apps are typically optimized to keep an individual driver’s travel time as short as possible; they don’t care whether the residential streets can absorb the traffic or whether motorists who show up in unexpected places may compromise safety. Figuring out just what these apps are doing and how to make them better coordinate with more traditional traffic-management systems is a big part of my research at the University of California, Berkeley, where I am director of the Smart Cities Research Center.
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This article appears in the October 2019 print issue as “When Apps Rule the Road.”

About the Author

Jane Macfarlane is director of the Smart Cities Research Center at the University of California Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies, where she works on data analytics for emerging transportation issues.