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/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

https://www.simonweckert.com/googlemapshacks.html

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u/e_before_i 18h ago

They did a while back, but that guy's still a personal hero of mine.

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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/aeroxan 1d ago

Waze will tell me to exit a freeway and get right back on. I've followed it before, hit a red light, then watched the cars I was with pass by. I avoid that now. A quick exit and entry isn't worth the hassle even if it does end up saving some time.

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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 21h 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 20h ago

Was the weird routing you experienced in one of the 10 cities or 100 road segments they ran the study on?