Driving Under the Influence of Apps aka Map Apps are ruining road layouts.

[Swilly]

https://youtu.be/NOkYK2yuyeM

[Seris]

I often find it easier to go with the flow and ignore google maps when it wants to reroute you, seems to cause more issues than it solves from what i've experienced

[Swilly]

There's an article from the Atlantic that I pulled this video from, but I thought the video did a better job explaining the issue more than the article.

[Hickleberry]

I work in the traffic industry as a consultant. I can say with 100% certainty that apps like Waze and Google Maps while useful, cause massive issues for city traffic engineers. Signal timing and coordination is generated, deployed, then tweaked based upon volume, occupancy, and speed data collected via a variety of means. When an app tells you to hop off the freeway to utilize a major arterial instead, this goes against the model that was originally generated to be most effective for that corridor and causes issues with coordination and creates unnecessary saturation. It might seem well and all behind the wheel, but when you're local and all of a sudden your usual commute is flooded by traffic from a freeway or nearby city, it can clog shit up real fast.

[Iknowtoomuch]

It sounds like the methods to generate those models need to be updated, then. People aren't going to stop using these apps.

[Hickleberry]

The industry is headed toward what is called connected vehicle. Audi is kind of leading the way in terms of integrating them in their vehicles as a standard feature, but as time goes on we'll see retrofitting efforts. The idea is to have cars talk directly to traffic controllers and adjust signal timing based upon realtime, live individual data. Until that happens, what you're suggesting is essentially impossible. Until fully autonomous vehicles dominate the roads as a means of transportation, it's going to be a reaaaally slow burn towards efficiency.

[Ganerumo]

To be honest the entire vehicular infrastructure of most developed countries is asinine to begin with. There's a significant over reliance on individual vehicles which, while certainly useful, could in many cases be considerably cut down in numbers and replaced with better organized, more fluid public transports.

It's also a massive fucking waste of space.

[F.X Clampazzo]

Plus I mean like, the cost of a simple timer circuit vs. the cost of programming even a cheap process logic controller that can understand sensor data, communicate via a network and manage traffic in a smart way is astronomical when you think about how many traffic lights exist in a city.

[Swilly]

The issue is that it costs millions to replace the roads and redesign them with these apps in mind; and even then the Apps will auto adjust into another path to avoid the traffic altogether.

These apps are just inherently dangerous to begin with, and a lot of automated vehicles use some version or something similar to these apps. Sponteanous pile ups are probably just going to become a more common thing.