Waze and Your Street
Waze is forcing people to choose what kind of a street they want to live on. Not in the metaphorical sense of who their neighbors will be, but in the literal sense of, what kind of traffic calming and pedestrian-friendly measures they will — or won’t — physically put on their streets to make them less attractive to cars looking for the shortest route from point A to point B (even if points A and/or B happen to be in the neighborhood); which on the bright side does have the effect of making them more attractive to pedestrians, cyclists, children, and other living things.
It’s no longer enough to rely the age-old strategy of hoping your neighborhoods’ secret shortcuts remain undiscovered by outsiders navigating along arterial roads (not that this was ever completely effective), nor will you be able to get away with the mental double standard which says you are entitled to keep through traffic out of your leafy subdivision’s public streets, while reserving for yourself the right to carelessly speed through those same streets when you are running late. As if your streets were not public property, as if those outsiders did not have every much a right to use them as any other taxpayer.
No, my separated-use, residential-neighborhood-dwelling friend, you will now need to think about the fundamental design of your streets, and whether you want to continue optimizing them purely for cars, or whether you want to think about making them more complete, with bike lanes and sidewalks; making them narrower, rather than wider, precisely so that less cars can get through, so that those that do get through have to go slower, etc.; even if that makes your morning commute three minutes longer.
Fighting the algorithm by introducing bad data is futile; Waze is smarter than you, and if it’s not, the crowd it unites is. It will detect and discount questionable data, and if enough people are already traversing your streets for you to notice, your puny attempts at creating fake incident reports will be overwhelmed by the number of real Waze drivers, every one of which is reporting your streets as clear, time-saving thoroughfares for the cars behind them.
To stop this hive-minded four-wheeled horde, you will have to actually, physically slow the cars down — including your own — to the point where it is faster for them to take the arterial roads around your neighborhood. In fact it was probably your neighbors — or maybe even you — who gave the secret away: when you were driving with your Waze app open, straight from work to the grocery store, or the movie theatre, or the school, or whatever points A and B you were connecting when your secret shortcut made the most sense for avoid the road closures ahead. Waze didn’t know that you were a local resident with special shortcut privileges; all Waze saw was a driver passing through the neighborhood. And just like that, the secret was out: hundreds of drivers passing through, thousands of person-hours saved, and your quality of life, down the drain.
If these previously secret shortcuts that Waze turns up are too appealing, you might even need to install physical barriers blocking them — even if that means that you and your neighbors can no longer take them either. Cities, led by Portland, have started doing this.
In future, we can imagine cities building such measures into their neighborhoods proactively, during planning, during periodic reviews, or as preparation for planned roadway closures. In areas where Waze has data sharing partnerships with local government, they could even simulate what routes the app would create as a result of planned work or closures, and coordinate traffic calming measures along these routes in advance or simultaneously to the work.
And thus we see Waze contributing to urban planing.
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