Dan Fumano: 'Rat-running' and 'the price of anarchy': Vancouver copes with GPS-enabled cars
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2020 23:05:49 +0000
Cities around the world are grappling with the effect of mobile technology on traffic flows and looking for ways to tackle the problem.
A growing number of drivers are quipped with navigation technology, including route-finding apps like Google Maps or Waze, ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, and in-car GPS systems. The technology strives to get a driver to their destination as quickly as possible — and that can mean directing more drivers off major arterials and down residential side streets that weren’t designed to handle such traffic.
“I’ve had conversations with traffic engineers in other cities all across North America, and we’re all experiencing the same issue,” said Winston Chou, Vancouver’s manager of traffic and data management. “Apps are routing people down streets that aren’t necessarily the appropriate street for them to be driving on.”
Shortcuts have existed since the days when automobiles shared Vancouver’s roads with horses. But until recently, those shortcuts were limited by a driver’s knowledge of local streets. Historically, most drivers generally stuck to arterial roads to get from point A to B, which were the routes local governments planned for most traffic to use.
But now, drivers can have a portable navigator on their dashboard which could direct them to duck off of a major arterial like 41st Avenue, and instead shoot down 42nd, an adjacent side street never intended as a thoroughfare.
The phenomenon of drivers shooting down side streets is real, and it’s a safety concern.
Chou calls it “rat-running.”
The recent arrival of Uber and Lyft will presumably increase the number of GPS-directed car trips on Vancouver streets. It’s still too early to know exactly how Uber and Lyft will affect Vancouver’s traffic, Chou said.
The city is monitoring ride-hailing’s roll-out and “will be collecting data and looking to receive data on it as well, but that will take time,” Chou said.
The City of Vancouver is already somewhat unusual in North America as a big city without a freeway. The decision to abandon the city’s plans for a freeway into downtown was contentious back in the 1960s, but is generally viewed today as helping to make the city a more livable place.
Now, Vancouver is looking to take another step towards slowing down vehicle traffic for the sake of making spaces more livable and safe for people.
City staffers are designing a pilot project to experiment with reducing the speed limit on certain residential side streets from 50 km/h to 30 km/h. Staff is expected to report back to council in the spring.
Chou and his staff have tried to communicate their concerns to software developers about route-finding apps directing motorists down side streets. They hope the apps will take any reduced speed limits into consideration.
Mike Wilson, Canada country manager for Waze, said in an email: “When local governments set speed limits, these changes are reflected in Waze and factor into routing recommendations.”
Like any technology, these apps have their limitations. This month, a German artist made international news for dragging a little wagon filled with 99 smartphones through empty Berlin streets to “trick” Google Maps into thinking the street was packed with a traffic jam.
Route-finding apps also have their critics. In L.A., the city attorney threatened legal action against Waze in 2018, and a city councillor wrote in an open letter that: “Ironically, many of these ‘shortcuts,’ end up causing more traffic in a race-to-the-bottom effort to cut travel times by using small cut-through streets.”
Alexandre Bayen, an engineering professor and director of the University of California-Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies.
It’s an emerging area of academic research. Among transportation engineers, the concept of “the price of anarchy“ describes the difference between the scenario where every driver selfishly chooses the fastest route for themself and the socially optimal scenario where the overall traffic system flows as efficiently as possible.
Alexandre Bayen, the director of the University of California-Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies, has researched the relationship between shortcut-finding apps and the price of anarchy. In 2018, Bayen’s team released a presentation called “Driving Under the Influence of Apps,” which investigated the “unintended, consequences caused by uncoordinated, app-enabled, traffic information dissemination.”
A route-finding app’s goal is to get the user to their destination as quickly as possible, Bayen said. But, his research found, if enough drivers use these apps at the same time, it can make congestion worse on local side streets.
“This is where regulation or incentivization has to intervene,” Bayen said. “In other words, you’re going to have to trade time for something.”
One thing motorists could trade for time is money: Some cities, including London and Stockholm, have “mobility pricing” systems in place where drivers effectively pay a toll in order to drive through certain high-traffic areas at peak times.
Clearly, many drivers won’t like the idea of tolling more roads and bridges. But some experts, including Bayen, say the experience of some European cities shows mobility pricing can be a more fair and efficient way to guide traffic around a region.
Mobility pricing has been examined in Metro Vancouver recently: An independent commission delivered a report on the subject to TransLink in 2018, and it was referred to staff for further research. With TransLink currently at work on a long-term planning process called Transport2050, we should find out by the end of the year if mobility pricing could be in the region’s future.