The New Aesthetic

Your Navigation App Is Making Traffic Unmanageable

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. […] On top of all these problems, these rerouting apps are all out for themselves. They take a selfish view in which each vehicle is competing for the fastest route to its destination. This can lead to the router creating new traffic congestion in unexpected places.

[via Felix S.]