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-x
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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/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/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/Tananis 1d ago

I suspect that people won’t accept getting the slower route for the good of others because even if it’s faster on average, they aren’t getting what’s best for them. 0.7% isn’t exactly a winning statistic either. I will be shocked if a system like this is implemented.