See, now that’s an interesting statement. I’ve found no luck overruling Waze, except at the margins of a minute or two here or there. It’s gotten to the point that I almost never try to out-think her (my Wazette is definitively female) except on my most traveled routes where I understand, say, the interplay of light timing between two alternate routes.
By contrast, a few times that I’ve thought that I knew better, the result was to drive myself into a hot mess of black swan traffic that Waze knew was there, thus had routed me around. Humbling.
The long run implication of more capacity is not faster travel times. It’s long been known that adding more highway capacity adds more traffic, so the new roads end up just as clogged as the old ones, once people discover the added capacity. So travel times end up reaching the same slow equilibrium in the end. Now that clog will cover more of the city streets and not just the highways.
yup. and all on streets not designed to handle all that traffic. main roads and highways are built different than side streets.
not to mention kids, dogs, bicycles, and pedestrians.
maybe it’s different in ca if no one who lives there wants to be outside of their home-car-work-gym-home-mall boxes. in the city where i live, it’s actually nice to be able to walk down the sidewalks without being overwhelmed by the noise of cars.
but, that’s changing – spill over is everywhere. and i’m assuming gps plays a role in that.
Heck, people drive down my one-way, one-lane side street all the time to avoid the minor inconvenience of waiting 10 seconds at the traffic light half a block down the road. And then end up waiting the same amount of time trying to turn off my street because there’s no light, the visibility at that intersection is poor, and it’s a much busier street they’re trying to turn on to.
This seems like some of the least surprising news I’ve read in ages. The goal of a connected urban street grid is to be able to absorb traffic. It is exactly why a nest of cul de sacs lead to increased VMT. A spread out traffic jam isn’t a jam. You don’t fight this by spending money on one way links and traffic redirection mechanisms. You fight it by increasing connections so that no link bears an unreasonable load and providing alternatives to auto travel.
