Latest News

Motorists Love Waze, People Who Live On Side Streets Not So Much

http://ift.tt/1PR8lgK
(KCAL)
The app Waze, which Google acquired back in 2013, is a navigational aid that’s sometimes useful, and sometimes leads to a car full of Consumerist editors driving in circles for a solid twenty minutes. You don’t have to use the app to be annoyed with it, though: some people are annoyed that the app sends people through their neighborhoods in the name of finding the fastest and most efficient route.

Being on a main thoroughfare isn’t bad if that’s what you signed up for, but what about when it isn’t? One woman who has lived in a quiet part of a quiet Los Angeles suburb for 16 years complains that her neighborhood has been disrupted by Waze (and, to be fair, probably other real-time traffic routing apps) that send people down her street when the 405 freeway is busy.

“We did have a resident that was here less than two years and decided that this was absolutely ridiculous, and so they moved,” she told TV station KCAL. She says that commuters start driving through her neighborhood around 7:30 in the morning, and the parade of loud music, motors, and pollution continues until 10 AM.

Waze, for its part, claims that when they send people down an alternate route to save time, they change the routes used to prevent this exact thing from happening. In a statement to KCAL, Waze said:

We alternate which routes are used, based on real-time conditions, to avoid generating congestion of our own on a different set of roads. It simply wouldn’t be effective to route a large amount of Wazers down a residential street and the app is built to prevent that.

Waze has been around and routing traffic like this for a while; some people even have tactics to prevent people from traveling down their streets, like allegedly reporting fake traffic jams to keep Wazers away.

Popular Waze Navigation App Driving Some People Crazy [KCAL]


by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

No comments:

Post a Comment

THE PLUG MAGAZINE Designed by Templateism.com Copyright © 2014

Theme images by Bim. Powered by Blogger.