Google’s A/B Test to Ease Congestion in Cities

The power of collaboration: How we can reduce traffic congestion

Google’s research team ran an A/B test on Google Maps to find out whether diverting traffic away from congestion-prone routes reduces congestion in San Francisco.

Neha Arora and Aboudy Kreidieh, Google:

In “Urban congestion relief experiments through routing-app interventions”, published in Nature Cities, we present the first large-scale, real-world study into the use of navigation platforms to improve traffic. We show that coordinating even a small fraction of trips to disperse traffic can measurably improve driving speeds and reduce emissions for the entire city.

There is a positive effect for some. People living along those roads seeing more traffic as a result of Google’s change will disagree. As with so many traffic interventions, this again solves the wrong problem. We need fewer cars on the road, full stop, not better distribution thereof. That would reduce congestion and emissions in urban areas more than diverting cars.