Had this happen three times in the last month or two in Northern California. As long as I follow the new route strictly, I usually get there at about the same time I would have otherwise, but with a brand new view of the cityscape / rural landscape. Went for a nice river drive last week, 10/10 so far.

When the road widens, it meets a need, which means more people consume it. When they make the road too expensive to consume, people consume it less. We should have double-decker freeways and people zipping along from wherever they want to be. If you want to deal with sprawl, then plan sensibly. Do not use the roads as a misery choke point. Traffic engineers are fucking assholes, every last one of them.

Induced demand is plainly a theory with lots of holes. It sees no utility in moving any greater number of people the same distance in the same amount of time, according to induced demand theory that's a complete waste. If induced demand were true, Japan's Wangan should be clogged with traffic instead of empty enough for ultra-high-speed street racing, and China's highways to newly-built empty towns should probably be full of traffic for some reason too.

The best debunking of the idea I've run across comes fr

> As with other traffic interventions, there's a risk that Google's approach to spreading traffic could backfire. This concept, known as "induced demand," also applies to efforts like adding a lane to a critical highway, which temporarily relieves congestion, until traffic rises again. "You can do this, but you cannot be too successful, because if you are too successful, then more people will start driving, and essentially you'll be back to ground zeroâ¦"

Oh fuck all the way off.

This idea of "induced demand" always comes up in the context of traffic improvements, as though the goal of traffic design is to keep people from driving. (We had a sale on apples, and everyone bought our apples! Damn this counterintuitive induced demand!) Add a bypass and now it's full of cars? Good! That was the whole point: to help people live where they want to live and get to where they want to get to. Every car making up that new traffic jam is being driven by someone who is, on balance, willing to sit through it because of the positive effects it's had on them.

You can point to pollution and carbon emissions and freeways splitting communities, of course. There are plenty of reasons not to want more roads, and plenty of reasons to want to force people to adopt different living habits than they want to. But if that's your aim, at least be honest about it.

I nominate you to always take the B-route so that I might squeeze out an extra 2 mph on the freeway. Don't worry, the long way is full of nature, and just smell that fresh breeze with guaranteed less carbon! No sir, you are not a loser.

I was driving up the 101 once, north of San Francisco, maybe around San Rafael (not to far from Lucas Ranch). There was an accident or something on the freeway resulting in a huge pileup of vehicles. Google suggested an alternate route, but it must have suggested the same route to everyone. That route was a road with one lane on each side, so no good way to turn around, especially in traffic, and rural, so no intersections for maybe five or ten miles. Apparently, thousands of other vehicles had followed goo

Induced demand does not mean that building roads never reduces congestion; new capacity can provide substantial and sometimes lasting benefits. Rather, it means that traffic responds to changes in the cost and availability of road travel, just as traffic can decrease when road capacity is reduced through people changing routes, times, destinations, modes, or simply making fewer trips.

If you use google to find your way to work and home, you have truly drunk the kool-aid.

Deliberate unauthorized tampering with lawful street traffic? Check.

Deliberate experimentation on unsuspecting humans? Check.

The Stanford University Institutional Review Board clearly dropped the ball on this one. Not entirely surprising since Stanford is Google's alma mater and I'll let you imagine what that means for board members.

There's a right way and a wrong way. The right way:

1) Ask humans for permission to experiment on them, before experimenting on them. No matter how minor the inconvenien

Google has a fundamental problem with perception of which roads are equivalent.

It often sees rural 60mph roads as equivalent to highways where in reality they former are narrow, bendy, sometimes dangerous, and you can never so more than 30mph on them safely.

When I drive, I want the less hassle. I want to get from A to B with the least amount of thinking and stress. I would choose the road I know, or the road with the least number of turns over a road with even a 10-minute saving any time.

That's why I always turn down Google re-route suggestions. They are absolutely silly and detached from reality, and it annoys me to no extent that there is no global setting that aould allow you to disable automatic rerouting completely.

I'd like to be able to start the nav, look up the route, correct as need it and pin it so that it doesn't change mid way. Any modifications to the route should only be made on demand when I interact with the maps and tell it to try and re-route.

There's also something else that irks me considerably on Google Maps. In the UK it is illegal to interact with your phone in any way while driving. When Google re-routing pop-up appears, the default action after the timeout is "accept". This means that if I wanted to just follow the route I chose at the start of the journey, I'd have to break the law to turn the suggestion down.