The way to maximise traffic congestion would be to remove trucks off the road during peak times, banning trucks from the fast lane at all times, making it the social norm to toot someone in the fast lane so they move over.
How we can reduce traffic congestion
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Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion
#12Traffic apps only know about congestion if someone running the app goes down the congested road. Because of this, I've always suspected that the apps, from time to time, will route someone down a route they haven't gathered data on in a while, just to collect the data, and even if the route is likely to be suboptimal.
I wonder this same thing when I’ve been routed completely asinine ways off interstates at night when traffic appears calm. I always have to play the game of “is there horrendous traffic ahead from night paving / accident, or am I being conscripted as a traffic sensor robot?”
Government data sources can input real time data into Google Maps [1]. So, it's more likely than not that local police or state DoT is behind that.
Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion
#13The way to maximise traffic congestion would be to remove trucks off the road during peak times, banning trucks from the fast lane at all times, making it the social norm to toot someone in the fast lane so they move over.
I have a lot of difficulty thinking those changes alone would solve congestion. I’m especially thinking is ski traffic along I70 from Denver to the mountains. The issue is just volume of passenger vehicles, and there are no other realistic routes
Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion
#14If we could copy the traffic laws of a country like Germany to the US, I think that would have the biggest + cheapest effect. I am OK with automated/elevated enforcement if it means stop & go traffic evaporates into free flowing conditions.
We should also take the idea from Finland where the traffic fines scale with each person's ability to pay. $100 for camping the passing lane or failing to maintain a reasonable following distance is not a big consequence for a lot of people. $100k covers the edges a lot better.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/finnish-busine...
Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion
#15Traffic apps only know about congestion if someone running the app goes down the congested road. Because of this, I've always suspected that the apps, from time to time, will route someone down a route they haven't gathered data on in a while, just to collect the data, and even if the route is likely to be suboptimal.
Doesn't have to be true. My state has public camera feeds for various highway stretches. Too low-detail to identify vehicles but easily enough to detect congestion.
Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion
#16Interesting, I always just assumed they were already doing this.
Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion
#17When Google Maps routes me using a smaller secondary road instead of the main road that I would otherwise have used , I've always wondered whether that significantly changes the amount of traffic that smaller road sees. It's funny to consider that arbitrary black-box changes to the routing algorithm can have a noticeable effect to people that live there.
Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion
#18One of the things this type of intervention doesn't take into account is that different roads are built with different levels of hardiness based on the amount of traffic they are expected to receive. For instance, a few years ago, a segment of I-495 in Delaware needed to be unexpectedly shut down for emergency repairs. Drivers were rerouted. But because of the increase in traffic on the less-hardy detour route, that…
A random factoid that will always stick in my brain is that the damage a vehicle does to a road is proportional to the weight on an axel...to the fourth power. I suspect rerouting semis to the roadway is by far the greatest factor.
Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion
#19Where isn't there traffic congestion?
Re: How we can reduce traffic congestion
#20> For this study, the Google Maps algorithm was modified to prefer alternative routes with similar travel times and segment types, effectively guiding trips away from the pre-selected congested segments
> Over a six month period, we adopted a city-wide switchback (also known as crossover) experimental design, alternating between this treatment and the control (unaltered) routing algorithm over consecutive days to appropriately measure the effect of this intervention
> Averaged across cities, we observe a median increase of around 2% in driving speeds on targeted segments, corresponding to a median decrease of 0.5% to 1.0% in fuel consumption rates
The cities were: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle.
The data and code is also available (https://github.com/google-research/google-research/blob/mast...) from the paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-026-00443-x).
Kudos Google! Nice to see this kind of work. That said, let's just build more trains?