Indeed, the deal promises to help the city improve some of its traffic and infrastructure systems (L.A. still uses paper to manage pothole patching, for example), but it also acknowledges Waze’s role in the complex new reality of urban traffic planning. Traditionally, traffic management has been a largely top-down process. In Los Angeles, it is coördinated in a bunker downtown, several stories below the sidewalk, where engineers stare at blinking lights representing traffic and live camera feeds of street intersections. L.A.’s sensor-and-algorithm-driven Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control System is already one of the world’s most sophisticated traffic-mitigation tools, but it can only do so much to manage the city’s eternally unsophisticated gridlock. Los Angeles appears to see its partnership with Waze as an important step toward improving the bridge between its subterranean panopticon and the rest of the city still further, much like other metropolises that have struck deals with Waze under the company’s Connected Cities program. (...)
Many of the public data sets that Waze is drawing from—including both C.H.P. reports and L.A’s public-works database—are already available to anyone, but formalizing the information-sharing with cities arguably lends Waze additional reach and credibility, forestalls political interference, and opens the door to deeper collaboration in the future. From cities’ perspective, working with Waze signals a recognition that, if they don’t bring the company into their planning processes, Waze and its users will reshape cities on their own. In Los Angeles, where ten per cent of the populace uses Waze, this has already been taking place. (...)
As a regional coördinator, May oversees thousands of Waze volunteers in seven Western states. He says that he has spent much more time than he should, late into most evenings, fiddling with Waze’s maps, which is how he and others in the community got to wondering what might happen if they flattened all of L.A.’s roads. “Flattened” refers, here, to levelling the rankings assigned to roads in the algorithmic backbones with which Waze directs motorists. Typically, highways (including L.A.’s notorious freeways) are given so much weight that, once you’re stuck on one, the app is unlikely to reroute you, or even to provide alternative paths. May and others on Waze’s community boards began thinking about what might happen if they ranked pretty much every road other than an honest-to-God highway as a minor highway. Eventually they prevailed on the company to introduce the change. “Once we started trying it out, holy smokes!” he said. If you’ve used Waze, you know the thrilling feeling of going on a crazy Mr. Toad’s Wild Reroute to beat traffic.
Those reroutes have drawn ire from some of the tonier enclaves around Los Angeles. Richard Close, the president of the homeowners’ association in Sherman Oaks and an occasional Waze user (“I shouldn’t eat French fries, either,” he said on a local radio show, “but what can I do? Traffic is horrendous. So I indulge”), has said repeatedly that his neighborhood has been overrun with commuters. His aim, he says, is to reclaim formerly quiet residential streets now “invaded by people.” Close and other Angelenos have complained enough that, in the last week of April, the city councilman Paul Krekorian introduced a motion to “reduce the impact of cut-through traffic that results from use of Waze,” which might include moves like restricting the number of trips on some side roads. The “streets were never a secret meant for a select few,” Brian K. Roberts, a co-author of “L.A. Shortcuts: The Guidebook for Drivers Who Hate to Wait,” argued in a Los Angeles Times op-ed. He compared Krekorian’s demands to no-left-turn signs that were posted by residents in some neighborhoods following the release of his book in 1989, and suggested that those upset by Waze direct their efforts toward campaigning for better mass transit.
by Ryan Bradley, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Charly Kurz/IAF/Redux 
