Smartphone app being used to beat LA traffic angers freeway's neighbours
When the people whose houses hug the narrow warren of streets paralleling the busiest urban freeway in America began to see bumper-to-bumper traffic crawling by their homes a year or so ago, they were baffled.
When the people whose houses hug the narrow warren of streets paralleling the busiest urban freeway in America began to see bumper-to-bumper traffic crawling by their homes a year or so ago, they were baffled.
When word spread that the explosively popular new smartphone app Waze was sending many of those cars through their neighbourhood in a quest to shave five minutes off a daily rush-hour commute, they were angry and ready to fight back.
They would outsmart the app, some said, by using it to report phony car crashes and traffic jams on their streets that would keep the shortcut-seekers away.
Months later, the cars are still there, and the people are still mad. "The traffic is unbearable now. You can't even walk your dog," said Paula Hamilton, who lives on a once quiet street in the in a neighbourhood called Sherman Oaks.
Hamilton's winding little road up the low-slung mountains that separate the city's traffic-clogged San Fernando Valley from its equally traffic-clogged west side is now filled each weekday morning with a parade of exhaust-belching, driveway-blocking, bumper-to-bumper cars.
So is practically every other nearby street that parallels the busy Interstate 405 freeway, which carries 379,000 cars a day.
Attempts to thwart Waze users by reporting fake traffic problems are doomed, Waze spokeswoman Julie Mossler said because the app simply cannot be outsmarted. "With millions of users in LA, fake, coordinated traffic reports can't come to fruition because they'll be negated by the next 10 people that drive down the street passively using Waze," she said.
There are some things that can be done to mitigate the situation however, said Los Angeles Department of Transportation spokesman Bruce Gillman, such as placing speed bumps and four-way stop signs on streets. Lanes could even be taken out to discourage shortcut seekers.
But the bigger problem, Gillman said, is that everybody is using smartphone apps these days and they will quickly find every shortcut out there.
