Google traffic los angeles map drivers#

In some cities, residents are using the very tools ruining their neighbourhoods to fight back. So more people will use that rat-run, and thus more people will speed too.” Fighting back against navigation apps “Waze actually encourages speeding, because if a road is free-flowing, then people will speed, which makes the journey time show up as quicker. “I know several neighbours who are moving I also just want to move away now, which saddens me,” she adds. “People are woken by cars beeping each morning so have moved their bedrooms,” explains Rebecca. Minor roads, in particular, pose a higher pollution risk due to the number of people living near them and the fact that buildings on the sides of those roads can “trap” the pollution particles. London’s Imperial College also found that pollution was two to three times higher closer to busy roads than at background locations. The risk for smaller injuries was even greater, with a 66% increase for minor roads. Research shows that, in the UK, pedestrians are 17% more likely to be killed or seriously injured on minor roads compared with major roads for each mile a vehicle travels. So, is rat-running just an annoyance for residents?

Google traffic los angeles map drivers#

On the other hand, some 75% of drivers who used navigation apps spent over four minutes of each hour on local roads. In Los Angeles, for example, more than 70% of drivers who didn’t use these apps spent under four minutes of each hour on local roads. This has been further elaborated on in a speech by one of the paper’s authors, Alexandre Bayen, the director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies.Īccording to simulations from Bayen’s team, when drivers take shortcuts on routes that were never designed to handle the traffic, they continue to clog up the main roads as well as the minor roads around them.Īnd it is GPS routing apps such as Google Maps, not other factors, that Bayern’s team has identified as the root cause of increased traffic on minor roads. In the US, a team of researchers released a paper in 2017 that showed how navigation apps, rather than solving congestion issues, “have led to new congestion patterns that never existed before”. Meanwhile, traffic on minor streets has increased by more than a quarter. These findings aren’t limited to London: across the UK, traffic on motorways and A roads has increased by some 10% from 2009 to 2019. Rat-running, as the phenomenon came to be called, describes the practice of motorists using minor roads to avoid traffic, tolls and red lights, or to use shortcuts to reach their destination faster. Traffic on minor roads – which include countryside roads and residential streets – has surged from 6.6 billion vehicle miles in 2009 to 10.4 billion in 2019. So, if motorways have remained relatively unchanged, where did all those extra cars go? In 2019, the year before the Covid-19 pandemic dramatically shifted traffic patterns, that number increased only slightly to 12.3 billion. In London, the Department for Transport recorded some 12.1 billion vehicle miles on A roads and motorways in 2009. However, traffic on the UK’s motorways and ‘A’ roads – major roads intended to provide large-scale transport links within or between areas – has stayed relatively flat. Since 2008 – when the Google Maps mobile app first launched – traffic has increased, with the number of vehicles on UK streets rising from 34 million to nearly 39 million at the end of 2019.

How has Google Maps affected local traffic?