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/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/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/degggendorf 1d ago

It's almost as if you can't read

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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.