Re:Navigation Apps Turn Some Quiet Neighborhoods into Traffi...
by nullc on Monday December 25, 2017 @04:22PM
(#16005763)
I started avoiding using google to navigate after the second time it turned me into a jerk.
For a particularly egregious example, CA17 between los gatos and santa cruz frequently gets congested. The congestion appears to arise due to the capacity limits of the segment going over the mountain-- there is no simple alternative route around that.
For some inexplicable reason google directs a dense conga line of cars off the highway, through a quiet residential neighborhood in los gatos and right back onto the highway. The returning cars merge in just a half dozen cars ahead of cars not following google.
Because the reroute just jumped the queue a bit and didn't do anything about the actual bottleneck no good was done by the reroute, the only thing that was accomplished was making a surrounding neighborhood less safe and pleasant.
I guess this is the kind of socially irresponsible behavior we should expect from our new machine overlords at google. I avoid using their navigation solutions, and when I can't I at least try to ignore their reroutes since you can't tell when they're just telling you to make your trip seconds faster at an extreme expense to others.
For a particularly egregious example, CA17 between los gatos and santa cruz frequently gets congested. The congestion appears to arise due to the capacity limits of the segment going over the mountain-- there is no simple alternative route around that.
For some inexplicable reason google directs a dense conga line of cars off the highway, through a quiet residential neighborhood in los gatos and right back onto the highway. The returning cars merge in just a half dozen cars ahead of cars not following google.
Because the reroute just jumped the queue a bit and didn't do anything about the actual bottleneck no good was done by the reroute, the only thing that was accomplished was making a surrounding neighborhood less safe and pleasant.
I guess this is the kind of socially irresponsible behavior we should expect from our new machine overlords at google. I avoid using their navigation solutions, and when I can't I at least try to ignore their reroutes since you can't tell when they're just telling you to make your trip seconds faster at an extreme expense to others.