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Why people don't talk about Google Maps' privacy issues
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this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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Privacy
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There are often individual apps for various cities and transport organizations.
Traffic has always been a mixed bag. Yeah it's nice to be able to see that street A is more busy than street B. But so can everybody else, and they're all going to use street B now.
Meh, I find most people don't even bother.
I use secondary routes 90% of the time by default, because they're just as fast with less mental effort and less risk.
Why go with all the lemmings?
In my experience that's not how it works out. It's about balancing the load, while making the driver take the least amount of detour needed.
Street B only has to handle the remaining traffic, and street A has a chance to unclog or at least be a faster route as some of its traffic does not exist anymore.
The app doesn't control what people do, it just makes recommendations based on busy segments, based on data which is already obsolete by the time it's being used. Ultimately the lemmings will do whatever their lemming brain tells them to.
(That is, assuming the app doesn't actually try to spread people around the various routes. But I doubt that any app maker wants to assume responsibility for that.)
Ultimately traffic apps are mostly useless. You can't "solve" traffic congestion with apps any more than you can make water flow faster through a pipe. Congestion is constrained by available road space and choke points. Google Maps is mostly an excuse for Google to collect location data, with a thin layer of features on top to make it seem worthwhile.
Water does not think, it flows where it can.
People while driving cannot know which route isn't clogged, because cars are not flowing like water. If that would be the case all the small streets around main roads would be full too. If a street is clogged, and the driver sees it, they can decide to go on a different route, but in waze if they are using it to plan a route, it'll try actively to avoid roads that are too busy.
They are. If they aren't then your city is not really that busy. It's actually a major problem in some cities for the residents of small residential streets that suddenly start getting lots of traffic because their street gets recommended on Waze or Maps.