Lets take for example a street that goes from 1000 cars a day to 46,000 because it saves people 2 minutes. That means that every day 90,000 minutes are saved every day. That means that on arrogate the people of your city have 1000 hours a day to play with their kids, hang out with their family, make dinner and relax. Since time is money that could also convert to $15,000/day of lost productivity @$15 an hour. So in my opinion Waze is a public good and a nuisance to those well off folks that feel entitled to inconvenience others for personal benefit. You argue that government urban planners know better and traffic flow should follow the patterns that they had envisioned. I think traffic should flow like water or current down the path of least resistance for optimal efficiency. Waze acts as an equalizer it doesn't care if you are rich or poor, if your neighborhood is politically influential or not. An urban planner would never dare run a major thoroughfare though Beverly hills due the political blowback, or even a bus line connecting two poor parts of town. From a fairness standpoint if that's the most efficient route that's exactly where it should go and you should not have the right to exclude people from traveling through your hood or street.
A public good that does private harm. It's very easy to plug numbers into numbers and get numbers. This is one of the reasons few people consider externalities. They are the numbers that don't have numbers so they tend to get hand-waved away. By your math, saving 45,000 cars a day saves the city, at large, $15k a day. 'k. More simply put, it saves 33 cents per person on the road. How many people are there in the neighborhood? Let's say there's a thousand for magical, easy math. Do you think they'd trade $15 a day to have their neighborhood back? That's $5k a year. Probably a healthy chunk of their property taxes. Do you think they're entitled to throw up a 30-cents-per-car toll booth? I'll bet you don't. After all, they didn't build that road. But their property taxes paid for it. Everyone's property taxes paid for it. Thing is, their property taxes are related to the assessed value of their homes, and having a constant stream of commuters is kicking their property taxes in the nuts. How much? Well, externality. Hard to say. How much is due to the bad roads? how much is due to the increased pollution? How much is due to the assessor fearing for his life as he tries to cross the street? That's just the semi-easy stuff. What are the public health costs of having the air pollution that much closer to homes? The increased noise? The decrease in safety? Harder to put a number on, but no less real. But all those people on Waze are going to flip their shit if someone builds a lemonade-stand-style toll booth because our freedomz. I shouldn't have to argue that urban planners know better. That's what they do. They plan. There WAS a freeway planned through Beverly Hills. It would have done exactly what you wanted - "flow like water down the path of least resistance." The rich people won and the Westside is a neighborhood. The poor people lost and Commerce/Downey/et. al. are a wasteland. I can honestly say you don't know what you want. Splitting time between LA and Seattle, you get to see two visions: the "build roads everywhere" apocalypse and the "please god let's not turn into LA" congestion. Congestion is better. Thirty cents a day to save two minutes. What does that buy in vanpools? What does that buy in bus routes? What does that buy in mass transit? What does that buy in bike lanes? What does that buy in planned public benefits instead of free-market predation? You could have gotten your wish. Take a peek out the window as you cross the 520. That should have been six lanes through the arboretum. Think about traffic that "should flow like water" and then click around. You might think you want to live there. Me? I've crossed under the 405 on bicycle and I can tell you unequivocally that I do not.
I haven't crossed 520 since the tolls came up. I dont go to that side any more unless I absolutely have to and then I just use I 90 and go in non traffic times. I dont think 6 lanes on 520 would have been a bad thing it would have prevent the 3-2 carpool lane merging shit that was constantly clogging it up on the east side. The bigger problem is that I-5 cant be expanded due to the problem with the convention center. Not sure if that was a problem back then though. As a counter example the rich folks on mercer island have a highway running through their little paradise and I dont see them suffering too much. The bigger problem with the Thomson express way is that it would have cut the city up too much and made too much unusable space. There would have been 2 highways running parallel to each-other less than 2 miles apart which would have kind of been a waste of space. Some of those routes actually make a lot of sense though. The Nortwest expressway extension was my commute route when I lived in the Ballard area for example and worked north. The Bay Freeway (that instead became the mercer mess) 5th street bridge and the Vashon island connection all could have made sense (although costs could have been prohibitive). None of this is really all that related to the original issue of pushing relatively low speed traffic down city streets. There are places in Seattle where that hasn't happened but almost anywhere South of 85th this is already a thing and density is high enough that residential streets dont really exist any more per say except in some corners of Ballard. Once you have enough people living in an area it really doesn't make sense to treat the area the same way you treat a sprawling suburb neighborhood and try to block people from traveling through.Take a peek out the window as you cross the 520. That should have been six lanes through the arboretum. Think about traffic that "should flow like water" and then click around.
The rich folks on Mercer Island whined their way to the most expensive project in state history (at the time; UW Electrical Engineering building somehow cost more) to have the 90 go under their little paradise. They ain't dumb. And this isn't 6 lanes on 520 we're talking about - this is six lanes slicing through the Arboretum and UW on its way from the Rainier Valley to Lake City. The road itself isn't the issue - it's what the road does to the turf it cuts through. As you say yourself: Yet you seem to be arguing that an unplanned expressway is preferable to a planned expressway. Why? Right - at some point you need to figure out how to move the people without destroying the neighborhood in the process. Thus, urban planning. Thus, Waze the externalizer of neighborhood blight, thus why I hate Waze and why I think they will be sued into behaving eventually.The bigger problem with the Thomson express way is that it would have cut the city up too much and made too much unusable space.
There are places in Seattle where that hasn't happened but almost anywhere South of 85th this is already a thing and density is high enough that residential streets dont really exist any more per say except in some corners of Ballard. Once you have enough people living in an area it really doesn't make sense to treat the area the same way you treat a sprawling suburb neighborhood and try to block people from traveling through.