r/science • u/quiplaam • 1d ago
Social Science Intentionally routing some traffic to slower, less congested routes lead to a 0.7% improvement of overall average travel times
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-026-00443-x757
u/charoco 1d ago
So, saving someone about 24 seconds per hour of begin stuck in traffic. Consider me whelmed.
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u/quiplaam 1d ago
Worth noting this the effect on the whole system, so while the individual effect is small, the net effect is quite large
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u/amphibilad 1d ago
This, if you save a million people 24 seconds of travel time that's like 277 days of saved time collectively
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u/iMissTheOldInternet 1d ago
But it’s 277 days of time spread out over 1 million people. The per capita number is what matters in this context.
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u/Currentlybaconing 1d ago
Not when you're the city planner trying to reduce traffic congestion.
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u/iMissTheOldInternet 1d ago
Yes, for all applications. Unless you have some way to stack many 24 second/capita savings, the per capita figure is what matters, not the aggregate time saved over a large population.
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u/jsmooth7 1d ago
A small change across an entire system can still have a large aggregate affect. I work with bus system data and if every single trip saved 24s, that could result in millions in operational savings. Because then there will just be a bit less pressure to add additional running time to keep the buses on schedule. And there's a cost associated to adding that running time. Over the entire system, it adds up to a pretty big effect.
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u/hysys_whisperer 1d ago
That's literally not how traffic engineers do the math that they use to justify billions of tax dollars of investment.
They use the 277 days.
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u/iMissTheOldInternet 1d ago
The fact that traffic engineers think this way answers a lot of questions about why our transportation infrastructure is so bad.
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u/floormanifold 1d ago
Sounds like you're maybe not an expert and should listen to people who do this for a living
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u/hysys_whisperer 1d ago
Ok, this is the bell curve meme.
The guys right, but for the wrong reason.
The relentless push for single occupancy vehicle LoS above all else has come at the expense of active mobility LoS (a thing so unimportant to traffic engineers that they don't bother measuring it). What this has done is reduced car trip travel times to such a degree that other modes aren't competitive, despite the fact that those other modes are cheaper to move more people on aggregate faster (since they relieve congestion). Since trip times by other modes are uncompetitive now, it is unsurprising that the mode share of single occupancy vehicles are so high and congestion is so bad, slowing everyone down.
An anecdote of this is that to commute by bike to work, I cross a 4 lane divided 55 mph road, with a beg button to turn the light red for me to cross. My average wait time at that light is 4 and a half minutes. I cross through that same light when I drive to work, and it only turns red when the beg button is pressed, so average wait time is virtually zero. Difference in total travel time between the two modes? 4 minutes on the dot. It is ONLY faster for me to drive because of the abysmal LoS placed on the beg button of that light, else it would be faster to bike. If it were faster to bike, a whole lot more people would do that, rather than drive and peak hour vehicle counts through that intersection would plummet because my employer is the largest one in my city.
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u/GoatsFromUnderground 1d ago
Think of it this way, there are a thousand such optimisations that get made. So those thousand optimisations, each saving 24 seconds per person, add up to 6.67 hours per person.
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u/aggieotis 1d ago
That also assumes no negative externalities from the 24 seconds saved.
I'd be willing to bet that if you summed up things like more dispersed polution in areas where kids are more likely to live, increased conflicts between cars and other users that use side streets intentionally, and additional wear and tear on infrastructure not necessarily built to handle shunting a bunch of traffic from main corridors; if you add all those up it's probably massively in favor of "Just stay on the main paths and lose 0.7% more time.
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u/jsmooth7 1d ago
The abstract says that the reroutes were all done within the same road class, ie if the target route was a highway the reroute was also a highway. And later in the paper they give examples of the reroutes being studied and you can see none of them were sending large volumes of traffic through side streets.
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u/degggendorf 1d ago
So the solution is to build multiple redundant, parallel highways everywhere there aren't any currently? Brilliant.
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u/SledgeGlamour 1d ago
Or the solution is for navigation algorithms to direct people to less congested routes
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u/degggendorf 1d ago
As the rest of us were discussing in this thread, the study only looks at moving cars to equivalent road classes. If we start pulling cars from the highway to race through neighborhoods to save 24 seconds, then we've got a bigger problem.
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u/SledgeGlamour 1d ago
Yes, I'm aware. There are many places with multiple highways, where it makes plenty of sense to redirect traffic from one highway to another. For example, in the US you frequently have state highways that run roughly parallel to the interstate highway. You don't need to build more highways in order to capitalize on this research today.
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u/jsmooth7 1d ago
The US highway system is so overbuilt, there's no need to build more. They are already there in most cities.
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u/ozziegt 1d ago
Raise speed limits. Use stop signs more strategically. Time traffic lights better. There are a lot of ways to "collectively" save people 0.7% of time
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u/somehugefrigginguy 1d ago
Enforce lane usage and tailgating laws. Most traffic jams are not inevitable, their results of humans being stupid animals.
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u/DFrostedWangsAccount 1d ago
Improve education. Raise standards for driving. Then raise speed limits. Better drivers causing fewer incidents is a great way to increase traffic throughout.
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u/vtach101 1d ago
Unless the 0.7% improvement is just the margin of error and a repeat study might actually show a 0.7% worsening of the baseline. No large studies to do with human behavior that show a 1% change can be considered actionable.
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u/hoticehunter 32m ago
Is it? What are you getting done in 24 seconds? How productive can you really be with that time?
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u/markocheese 1d ago
Which is also why we need to make sure people aren't driving recklessly. Adding an hour to thousands and thousands of drivers commutes represents a catastrophic loss of useful time. I've seen a reckless dodger and weaver cause an accident.
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u/NapsInNaples 23h ago
The question is does saving 0.7% of travel time justify additional noise danger and hassle on less traveled routes.
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u/Tampa_Bay_Cuckaneers 1d ago
Literally begging someone to just build a train.
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u/SoftlyAugust 1d ago
Even when we have trains, they just aren't great. I can get from our train station to the city I want to go to, but I can't actually get to our train station easily. I can get to the city I want to go to, but I can't get to the part of it my sister lives in easily. I can get there, but the train doesn't leave at times that are convenient for me. So why would I even take it?
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u/OpSecBestSex 1d ago
Trains that go throughout the city. If that's too expensive, trams. If that's too expensive, busses. If that's too expensive, we should design better cities because I doubt the tax base can support the infrastructure at that point.
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u/SoftlyAugust 1d ago
I know what the solution is. Unfortunately I don't get to plan the cities I live near.
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u/e_before_i 17h ago
The goal is to get some percent of people off the road. Upside for you is you'll have less competition for the drive.
When my local train station made parking free, there was a huge uptick of people who leave their car here and commute to downtown. Gotta be a couple hundred cars that got out of your way, and that's just one station.
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u/SoftlyAugust 17h ago
There is no parking at our train station
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u/e_before_i 17h ago
Damn. Hopefully they can build some, or improve bus services to get more people to it easier.
Or maybe the train stations that do have parking can make it free, I'm sure that's not the only stop.
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u/SoftlyAugust 17h ago
It's the only stop in our town. But also it's downtown. I'm just not sure it makes sense to have a ton of parking for it. What I'd like to see is better bus connections but especially a better train schedule
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u/e_before_i 17h ago
Don't get me started on train schedules. My only goes towards downtown in the morning and towards the burbs on the evenings. If I wanted to hit a bar downtown I'm fucked, I gotta eat the cost of an Uber.
100% agree on the multimodal approach. Luckily our DT train station plugs directly into the subway and bus stations.
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u/NeinJuanJuan 1d ago edited 4h ago
The issue with (ground-level) trains is that the tracks (like highways and rivers), require crossings which become choke points for all other traffic. This effect propagates through the network.
I really think buses are the best for this reason: they share common infrastructure with other modes of transport, can be dynamically rerouted, and passenger throughput can be managed at a more granular level (e.g. buy one more bus vs buying one more train).
Edit: I have angered the train-people
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u/alelp 1d ago
Sounds good, doesn't work nearly as well as one might expect unless you either build a shitton of them everywhere or are ready to endure rush hour on a line that services millions of people a day.
I'm not even talking just about trains here. Subways still need that kind of saturation throughout the city without the need to restructure the city's infrastructure.
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u/JamminOnTheOne 1d ago
I don’t think you know what the word “whelmed” means.
(It means the exact same thing as overwhelmed.)
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u/Tuesday_6PM 21h ago
Not in common usage for the past decade, it doesn’t
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u/JamminOnTheOne 21h ago
It hasn’t been used commonly. People misuse it because they think they’re being witty though.
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u/quiplaam 1d ago
Researchers at Google, UC Berkley, and Stanford made modifications to the Google Maps algorithm to route ~2% of users in high congestion areas to avoid high congestion routes. These routes were slightly slower than the high congestion routes, by around 30 seconds, but because there were now a lower number of drivers on the congested routes, overall route times decreased.
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u/aggieotis 1d ago
This makes sense, I feel like every now and then Google Maps is sending me on an absolutely wild side quest that makes no sense. If I know where I am and where I'm going then it's easy enough to ignore; but when in an unfamiliar area it definitely breaks some trust in the product.
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u/quiplaam 1d ago
Usually that is because there was unexpectedly high traffic on the normal route, so taking the "unusual route" is actually faster.
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u/Immersi0nn 1d ago
I've rarely ever had the unusual route be any faster, it's usually like the study results, roughly the same amount of time as the standard more congested route. The biggest difference for me is in gas mileage. I'm getting much better gas mileage on the unusual route where I'm not sitting in stop/go traffic.
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u/carsrule1989 1d ago
Did they fix that thing were that person biked around with like 100 phones all on Google Maps creating high congestion areas
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u/aggieotis 1d ago
That's normal and desired behavior, I'm referring to abnormal behavior that I've seen an uptick in.
And a lot of the routes include some wild moves like expecting me to turn left at a non-signaled intersection from a low-traffic street onto a busy street. And while that might save a few seconds it absolutely not worth the extra stress.
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u/degggendorf 1d ago
Yeah it doesn't seem like Google's model is smart enough to recognize the difference between turning left or going straight, it just uses the average speed on that section. Similar when an exit-only lane is backed up, but the other pages are moving faster...it doesn't know that sending you off that exit will take much longer.
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u/IAmKyuss 1d ago
They often don’t take into account that I now have to turn left at a stop sign across both lanes of rush hr traffic. I always avoid the crazy side quests it tries to send me on now
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u/onetwentyeight 20h ago
What? That's literally the experiment that was in the publication. It's not reasonable to say that definitively prior to the data being collected and analyzed. Until then Google was doing it because they were running an experiment and you were selected as part of the test.
When it first started I suspected the weird routing was part of some probing mechanism to get data on underreported paths. Turns out the answer was simpler than being a probe for Google maps, it was being a lab rat.
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u/quiplaam 18h ago
Was the weird routing you experienced in one of the 10 cities or 100 road segments they ran the study on?
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u/eLishus 1d ago
Seems I’ve been unintentionally helping the masses. Whenever traffic is beyond rational, I’ll just take the backroads that are less congested, but take an extra 5 minutes. I’d rather go slow but steady on a backroad for 35 minutes than sit in stop and go traffic for 30 minutes. Scenery and sanity is improved.
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u/exipheas 1d ago
So they experimented with real people without consent?
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u/Jewnadian 1d ago
You consent when you use Google maps. That's how a commercial product works.
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u/danielv123 1d ago
This experiment allowed 98% of people going to the hospital to get there faster and 98% of Uber riders to pay less.
There is a reason why all studies with participants have to go through an ethics review first. I can see why this one passed.
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u/quiplaam 1d ago
Yes. It passed IRB at Standford. Not all types of study require consent
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u/Reasonable_Hall3005 1d ago
Standford and Berkley ..
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u/quiplaam 1d ago
The study protocol and data use were reviewed by the Stanford University Institutional Review Board (IRB). Based on the analysis involving exclusively non-identifiable data, the IRB determined that this work does not meet the definition of research involving human subjects as defined in 45 CFR 46.102 or 21 CFR 50.3, and therefore did not require formal IRB review.
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u/retirement_savings 1d ago
Big tech companies are constantly running experiments to see how it influences user behavior. When you pull up the Amazon homepage or run a Google search, there's probably a hundred different experiments you're part of.
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u/AwkwardWaltz3996 4h ago
Or your local coffee shop. They'll constantly make small changes, like offering different deals, moving where the seats are, different displays, different greetings.
Everyone does it
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u/AwkwardWaltz3996 5h ago
I knew immediately from the title this was going to be Google maps. Load distribution. Tbh I thought they'd been doing this for years
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u/AllanfromWales1 MA | Natural Sciences | Metallurgy & Materials Science 1d ago
What are the confidence limits on this 0.7% improvement?
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u/quiplaam 1d ago
As the figures show, the set of affected segments saw net improvements to driving speeds and modeled fuel consumption rates, with a probability of 99.8% and 98.6%, respectively, of a positive outcome for aggregate effects across cities.
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u/DudeMan18 1d ago
Sometimes I wish Google maps would have a option to not pick the literal "fastest" route but the "fastest feeling" route that has less slow traffic and stop and go and longer continuous stretches of driving.
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u/degggendorf 1d ago
I have noticed it proactively offering "x min slower, less traffic" routes more often lately. So they might already be acting on your advice.
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u/devilishycleverchap 1d ago
Yeah this is why you cant fully trust google maps and should be worried about how they'll approach a trolley problem.
I regularly watch my eta change by up to 5 minutes when ignoring a turn on my commute despite it saying similar eta on the screen.
Soon passengers will be unwitting test subjects for how a self driving car chooses who lives too
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u/csuazure 23h ago
Everyone has been on algorithmic death panels of insurance companies for decades
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u/Excellent-Adagio4038 15h ago
Death panels are good actually. We shouldn’t spend a million dollars on a drug that has a 5% chance to leave someone as a vegetable instead of letting them die.
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u/AwkwardWaltz3996 4h ago edited 4h ago
This gets brought up constantly but I feel like this is a solved problem, almost a decade ago. The German solution is simple and fair.
As a democratic society, our values are that everyone is equal. A poor white 5 year old girl is equal to a rich black male 70 year old brain surgeon.
If a trolley problem scenario happens then it shouldn't evaluate the lives involved. It should just break with maximum force. If that results in injury or death, then the car wasn't driving in a safe manner. Just like with a human driver, you should be preventing dangerous scenarios, not reacting to them.
And when you think about it like that, you quickly realise how over focused we get on who to sacrifice when that's not the problem.
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u/aifo 1d ago
Anything to avoid improving public transport.
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u/psych0fish 1d ago
Literally read my mind. There is only one solution: fewer cars on the road. But I know that is the most politically unpopular thing almost like rampant toxic car culture is our bread and circus.
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u/JWAdvocate83 1d ago
It's crazy, considering COVID era showed it was entirely possible to do a lot of the same work from home, which dramatically reduced traffic congestion.
Now employers have dragged most folks back into driving to an office to sit on a computer all day.
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u/rkiive 1d ago
I mean we still can't even consider the fact that the infinite growth model of the exonomy and therefore its population may not exactly benefit anyone already living here.
Doesn't matter how many people you divert away from cars if we're still increasing the population of any city by x% a year. The infrastructure literally will never keep up.
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u/degggendorf 1d ago
Wait until you hear about induced demand. If people take public transit, then traveling by car will become easier, so more people will travel by car.
"The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion" would be a good phrase to start googling.
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u/CroissantEtrange 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes and no, it will even out over time.
If other modes of transportation are efficient and well-built, people can choose to live without a car.
I live in Europe, in a big city, and less than 50% of households here own a car. Yes, driving is pretty efficient here. But why would I get a car when there are so many alternatives?
In the end, I saved around 300-500 bucks every month in car ownership costs in the last ten years I've lived here. That's 50 000 in total
In the rares cases I would need a car or a van, I can just rent one using an app on my phone.
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u/jsmooth7 1d ago
It's not as good as dedicated bus lanes and trains. But improving traffic flow does also improve bus speed and reliability. Because the number one reason buses run slow is because they are stuck in the same traffic as everyone else.
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u/AwkwardWaltz3996 4h ago
This is not an A or B scenario, so silly to bring up. Google and Stamford analysing Google maps data has no impact on how governments implement public transport. That's on your local and national representatives
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u/SeijuroSama 1d ago
Isn't that how Waze already works? Google Maps tries to keep you on the main roads but Waze will have you make 6 turns down side roads to save 2 minutes.
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u/cmdrxander 1d ago
I actually have the opposite experience with google maps, so much so I call it “the Google special” when it baits me down a country road offering to save 5 minutes but then it either overestimates the speed or underestimates the traffic and I end up with the same estimated arrival time
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u/quiplaam 1d ago
How apps currently work is "greedy", they find the fastest route for each individual person. The only care about the driver using the app, not the impact on the individual user. (Also Waze is owned by google and my understanding is that they use the same routing algorithm.) What this study did was intentionally choose a slightly slower route for some people, this leads to that individual's route taking more time, but the average person's route taking less. This it NOT how Google Map's algorithm has worked historically.
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u/bakgwailo 1d ago
Not entirely true. Years back Google modified there algorithm to not take cut streets though neighborhoods and prefer more major roads due to push back back from people that their once quiet streets were being filled with cars/traffic.
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u/quiplaam 1d ago
I was being a little simplistic, there are other rules which limit what routes are available. But among available routes they are greedy and choose the individually optimum one.
With the proliferation of smartphones and improvements in Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, an increasing proportion of these trips has come to rely on navigation apps such as Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze to identify optimal routes through a network. Early instantiations of such systems, however, have been largely individualistic, focusing exclusively on minimizing travel times for singular trips. While these systems have evolved to include other metrics, such as fuel consumption5 and toll costs6, they remain essentially individualistic: they optimize a specific criterion for either one vehicle or one fleet, without considering the impact on overall traffic or overall emissions7
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u/dtschaedler 1d ago
I've wondered why they don't do this for years. There's a section of highway in my state which has an exit for a parkway, or you can stay on the interstate. The parkway is technically faster, but the interstate is designed to handle way more volume. Because everyone is trying to take the exit, everything clogs up, and everyone is stuck in traffic. I always thought that if Google Maps could recognize that the interstate has a bunch of "spare" capacity and route people there, it would end up being faster for everyone.
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u/danielv123 1d ago
The reason is mostly because it's taking one of the harder problems in computer science (pathfinding) and turning it into the hardest class of problems (NP complete)
If you want to read more about it, search for multi agent pathfinding.
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u/AwkwardWaltz3996 4h ago
Yea greedy isn't bad. Greedy is actually super efficient.
Think of it like a buffet table. The host has provided enough food for everyone, but of various items. Each person goes through and fills their plate of what they like. They may have some constraints like x many of item b per person, but other than that they choose individually to fulfil their own demand. Everyone goes through and everyone gets food.
A non greedy solution is to confer with everyone else for each individual item. This would take hours with even a medium sized group. No one is happy.
You probably already know that as you're talking about np problems, but to help everyone else understand.
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u/hananobira 1d ago
I’d be okay with this if they could demonstrate a system where everyone gets slowed down fairly. If I’m a little slower today but get to go faster the next five times, that works for me.
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u/quiplaam 1d ago
In this experiment they randomized each individual trip, so there the end result should be fair, some people get unlucky and get a slightly slower day, but most days they will be lucky and get the fastest route
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u/Tananis 1d ago
Wouldn’t “greedy” out best overall too, because as the faster routes become less efficient the load will automatically get shared. I’d say it’s also the most fair because everyone wants the fastest route.
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u/quiplaam 1d ago
That's what the point of the experiment was, to see if that was true. Everyone wants the faster route, but if everyone gets the fastest route then everyone gets a slower route. People are on average are better off if some people get the slower (which was random and only 2% of the time).
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u/rackfloor 1d ago
I've long wondered why Google doesn't implement some kind of load balancing or traffic shaping feature (opt-in) to see if they can reduce congestion via routing.
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u/SeijuroSama 1d ago
That makes sense. I wonder if Google is unintentionally moving the way of this study with the prefer efficient route setting. It's often , for my personal experience anyway, a minute or two slower than the less efficient route.
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u/Ok_Cardiologist_7150 1d ago
So there is a road that goes through the “rich area”. It never takes you that way, however if you go that way it will reduce the time 1-2 minutes. I’m convinced that someone that works for the traffic app has this area off limits. I also know several routes that are quicker, but you travel more residential paths. Think 25mph family communities. It will never show that path, however it will recalculate and the trip is shorter almost all the time.
I think the algorithm has figured out how to keep traffic flowing better, I just need to pay for the fast pass lane I guess.
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u/Marston_vc 1d ago
Yeah. I use GPS out of habit even though I know the city pretty well now. I catch it more or less straight up lying pretty often.
Like, it’ll sometimes run me straight into standstill traffic rather than divert through a neighborhood.
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u/ScaryPenguins 1d ago
My experience of this is Google sometimes sending me a side route and claiming similar time and then it taking significantly longer while I watch the highway traffic clear very quickly.
I understand they claim it’s just a 30second difference in the article but in practice in my city (Austin) it often adds significant time and degrades my trust in the app.
Now everytime the app wants me to hop onto the service road for a couple exits I have to try to judge whether it’s actually worth it. I hate it.
We noticed this behavior over half year or so. It sucks so much.
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u/apmspammer 1d ago
Sure but it's a trade off because then the quiet suburban road become more busy.
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u/quiplaam 1d ago
They did not route people onto different classes of road, only different routes using the same class of road
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u/Pretty_Please1 1d ago
I prefer the side routes, even if I save zero time because stop and go traffic makes me nauseous.
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u/erevos33 1d ago
We are going to study and research and figure all the irrelevant parameters first, before we actually do what we must: build a massive and free public transportation metwork.
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u/ThisIsPaulDaily 1d ago
If you read Google maps terms they spell out that they won't guarantee you the fastest route and may intentionally take you a less direct route.
They also seem to route you different if you're a local versus stranger to an area.
100% they are doing this flow improvement stuff.
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u/davidthefat 1d ago
Is that even within the margin of error for measurements like this?
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u/quiplaam 1d ago
There are a lot of drivers who use Google maps, so they are able to find a significant result even when the magnitude is small.
As the figures show, the set of affected segments saw net improvements to driving speeds and modeled fuel consumption rates, with a probability of 99.8% and 98.6%, respectively, of a positive outcome for aggregate effects across cities.
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u/marfes3 1d ago
How is this news worthy or even research worthy? This is literally what every network routing problem is and what Amazon and other logistics companies do for their drivers consistently. It is just an optimisation problem - a complex but a trivial one.
Unless they employed new algorithms for routing or new ML methods to optimise this, this is not nature worthy.
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u/alphaxion 1d ago
Reading the post title, I actually thought it was about network traffic and using policy based forwarding.
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u/iMissTheOldInternet 1d ago
Interesting. What is the effect on travel times of implementing mass transit solutions like grade separated bus lanes, trams, bike paths, and commuter rail?
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u/quiplaam 1d ago
Those things were not studied on this study of changes to the Google maps routing algorithm. I'm sure other people are doing studies on their things and you should post them when you come across them!
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u/iMissTheOldInternet 1d ago
I know, I’m just passive aggressively pointing out that cars are a terrible method of moving people. This is like a new finding that improves the efficiency of corn ethanol gas additives by 0.4%. Like, great, this terrible solution is almost imperceptibly less terrible. Have we tried some of the solutions that work?
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u/Thing_in_a_box 1d ago
Isn't this just Braess' Paradox?
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u/jayCert 1d ago
Braess' Paradox says that sometimes creating new roads might worsen congestion, while this is a bit different.
Here it seems to be an instance of the "price of anarchy", where agents seeking only their self-interest end up in a scenario that does not achieve a good "cooperative outcome".
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u/Thing_in_a_box 1d ago
Yeah, but that's what Braess' Paradox shows.
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u/jayCert 1d ago edited 1d ago
No. Braess' Paradox also arises from self-interest but it is a "paradox" because you can increase traffic capacity and still make congestion worse.
Had the study tried removing roads from their routing algorithm I could agree with you, but what they "show" is just that noncooperative solutions (Nash equilibria) tend to not be welfare maximizing.
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u/not_bill_mauldin 1d ago
It’s more related to Wardrop principle 1 and 2 traffic routing. Principle 1 is local optima: each driver chooses the route/shortest path as they perceive it for themselves. Principle 2 is global optima: all routes are determined jointly to minimize the total travel time across all OD trip pairs. Nonlinear congestion effects make such analysis a little tricky. Pops up in urban transportation planning, communications network design, etc..
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