And for all these other reasons too.

In a statement on his website, Weckert said his intention was to make changes in the physical world by using digital means.

“Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red, which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic,” he wrote.

He said he was interested in the day-to-day use of technology in all aspects of life within cities, including in navigation, accommodation, dating, transport, and food-delivery.

Citing a journal article by anthropologist Moritz Ahlert, he wrote: "Google’s map service has fundamentally changed our understanding of what a map is, how we interact with maps, their technological limitations, and how they look aesthetically.

“All of these apps function via interfaces with Google Maps and create new forms of digital capitalism and commodification,” the article continued.

Residential streets aren’t generally intended for through traffic. They’re meant to provide access to the people who live there. These are areas where kids play and people go on walks and stuff, having a bunch of cars run through trying to get from point A to point B as fast as possible is not ideal. That’s why you get cul-de-sacs, intentionally designed with one way in or out, to prevent drivers from cutting through.

…no…?

A lot of residential areas near here have a main street down the middle and a bunch of horseshoe shaped streets branching off. Makes it kind of worthless to go down the horseshoes unless you have a reason to since it doesn’t really go anywhere but back to where you were only slower.

There is one notable spot that comes to mind for me. There is a neighborhood near me that was originally supposed to have more houses but eventually got sold off and zoned commercial and they put in a Home Depot instead. The street goes through to the parking lot. The city actually put up big construction barriers to block off that access(at residents request) and turn it into a dead end street. Google even years later still routes you down that residential street instead of another block or so down the main road and then turning directly into the parking lot. Why?…it’s a few hundred feet shorter to go through the neighborhood. So a street that should only have like 2-3 cars on it an hour now has several dozen. Not to mention those people are most definitely speeding.

In order for Openstreetmap to do that, it would have to either:

• Crowdsource the data from people running an Openstreetmap mobile app with location data collection, which doesn’t exist and wouldn’t be accepted by the sorts of privacy-conscious people who prefer Openstreetmap, or
• Buy traffic data from a company like INRIX that actually goes to the expense of building and maintaining sensors along roadways, which it can’t afford because it doesn’t get that sweet exploitative advertising or surveillance capitalism revenue.

I suppose it’s possible that apps like OsmAnd could provide a feature for users to log into and receive traffic data from their own INRIX subscription that they bought themselves directly, but that would be such a niche feature it probably wouldn’t be worth the development effort.

Magic earth is pretty nice but not enough people using it to make it useful like waze

it would be nice if it had anything for public transit (I’m my area)

I dunno, it navigates pretty well but I find myself having to use Google for search

I am not saying traffic feature is bad. I am criticizing the little control we have to not contribute to the statistics. Google is a monopoly and decisions are made by them with little control over our devices.

Traffic feature is cool and for it I would contribute, but just pointing out that google hasn’t done it in the best possible way to gather statistics. I wouldn’t use traffic feature from google for this one reason.