I need this on my street. It’s 1/4 mile long, treated like a drag strip, and only started getting traffic after google maps showed it saving 12 seconds over the normal marked route.
Chaotic neutral.
Dude probably got tired of people using his street as a pass through. Googles gotten tons of heat for routing people through neighborhoods and stuff before. So all the sudden these residential streets started seeing orders of magnitude more traffic.
And for all these other reasons too.
In a statement on his website, Weckert said his intention was to make changes in the physical world by using digital means.
“Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red, which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic,” he wrote.
He said he was interested in the day-to-day use of technology in all aspects of life within cities, including in navigation, accommodation, dating, transport, and food-delivery.
Citing a journal article by anthropologist Moritz Ahlert, he wrote: "Google’s map service has fundamentally changed our understanding of what a map is, how we interact with maps, their technological limitations, and how they look aesthetically.
“All of these apps function via interfaces with Google Maps and create new forms of digital capitalism and commodification,” the article continued.
Aren’t streets… designed… to be passed through?
Residential streets aren’t generally intended for through traffic. They’re meant to provide access to the people who live there. These are areas where kids play and people go on walks and stuff, having a bunch of cars run through trying to get from point A to point B as fast as possible is not ideal. That’s why you get cul-de-sacs, intentionally designed with one way in or out, to prevent drivers from cutting through.
Oh, so that’s why its always quicker going through the back-streets but Google sends me through the clogged arteries like I’m Sheeple?
Makes sense, I guess. I’ll probably keep doing it even though it is a bit of a dick move
Oh I misunderstood OP’s message, thought they meant pedestrians as well. My apologies.
We have a real issue with the conflation of streets and roads in North America. Some people call these abominations stroads.
Proper urban planning makes a stark distinction between a street:
And a road:
…no…?
A lot of residential areas near here have a main street down the middle and a bunch of horseshoe shaped streets branching off. Makes it kind of worthless to go down the horseshoes unless you have a reason to since it doesn’t really go anywhere but back to where you were only slower.
There is one notable spot that comes to mind for me. There is a neighborhood near me that was originally supposed to have more houses but eventually got sold off and zoned commercial and they put in a Home Depot instead. The street goes through to the parking lot. The city actually put up big construction barriers to block off that access(at residents request) and turn it into a dead end street. Google even years later still routes you down that residential street instead of another block or so down the main road and then turning directly into the parking lot. Why?…it’s a few hundred feet shorter to go through the neighborhood. So a street that should only have like 2-3 cars on it an hour now has several dozen. Not to mention those people are most definitely speeding.
A better solution is a modal filter to enforce local traffic only rules
Goes to show how data from device always seems to contribute to some statistics.
Not that it’s always bad but problem today is that control isn’t with us to opt out completely.
Openstreetmaps anyone? I use organic maps most of the time to use openstreetmap data. Love the maps!
Upvoting for Organic Maps.
It amazes me something truly free can be so much better than the commercial behemoth version.
it would be nice if it had anything for public transit (I’m my area)
I dunno, it navigates pretty well but I find myself having to use Google for search
Yeah, it’s kinda crazy how Openstreetmap in general still isn’t capable of accurately searching for an address. I don’t understand why that’s still a problem.
Openstreetmap doesn’t offer traffic detection and rerouting?
In order for Openstreetmap to do that, it would have to either:
- Crowdsource the data from people running an Openstreetmap mobile app with location data collection, which doesn’t exist and wouldn’t be accepted by the sorts of privacy-conscious people who prefer Openstreetmap, or
- Buy traffic data from a company like INRIX that actually goes to the expense of building and maintaining sensors along roadways, which it can’t afford because it doesn’t get that sweet exploitative advertising or surveillance capitalism revenue.
I suppose it’s possible that apps like OsmAnd could provide a feature for users to log into and receive traffic data from their own INRIX subscription that they bought themselves directly, but that would be such a niche feature it probably wouldn’t be worth the development effort.
Magic earth is pretty nice but not enough people using it to make it useful like waze
How do you think rerouting and traffic notifications would work without back and forth communication? You can of course turn off location services, but than you lose the functionality of these features.
I am not saying traffic feature is bad. I am criticizing the little control we have to not contribute to the statistics. Google is a monopoly and decisions are made by them with little control over our devices.
Traffic feature is cool and for it I would contribute, but just pointing out that google hasn’t done it in the best possible way to gather statistics. I wouldn’t use traffic feature from google for this one reason.
yea, organic maps is pretty reasonable. after degoogling, it’s a great choice!
Funny as fuck. Nothing else to it!
Pure Art, seriously.
I hope to see this when I visit Berlin next year ❤️
