Naaah, fuck that. Waze is a piece of shit. It will deliberately route you on a side street to see if it's faster so it can send everybody else. It turns you into a worker ant for the swarm.

Waze will send hundreds of cars spiraling off the interstate (leaping across four lanes of traffic to do so) because it's decided that by hopping off and hopping on you can save a minute.

Waze will say "you don't get to use this because you're driving" and then you say "I'm a passenger" and it's all okay.

I know too much about traffic counts. They matter to me. And 30,000 cars a day is a four-lane commuter feeder. When a residential street gets 45,000 cars a day, that's the equivalent of 20x the wear it's supposed to get. Realistically speaking, that will turn a neighborhood into a potholed war zone within a season or two.

This is the externality of Waze - it moves the traffic from the areas it's supposed to be to the areas it was never intended to be. It is not a victimless crime. It turns a livable neighborhood into a war zone. And somewhere, there's a clever lawyer writing up a class action lawsuit against Google for damage to property values. Somewhere, there's a municipality looking to send Google a bill for premature destruction of roads. Somewhere, there's a public health organization making a tally of the damage to children and families due to traffic bouncing from freeways to quiet streets.

Because you know what? If the freeway is a problem, fix the freeway. Invest in mass transit. Provide incentives to work from home. All that shit. But handing it over to Waze makes all that stuff not happen. Instead, quiet neighborhoods take it in the ass.