Pissed off about LTNs? Wish things could just go back to the way they were?

Well we hope you're directing that anger towards the big tech companies like Google and Waze because if it weren't for them, we might not have even needed LTNs in the first place.

Here's why...

Do you remember what it was like to go for a drive somewhere new 20, 30, 40 years ago?

As you prepared for your journey you wouldn't pull out your phone, but instead, you'd study a book.

Not just any book -- but this guy

Your task was this: to memorise the simplest route from where you were now, to where you wanted to be.

A journey well driven was one in which you didn't have to stop to consult the map, awkwarly spread out across the dashboard, while traffic roared past you.

Enter Google Maps.

All of a sudden journeys become simple. A little voice erupting from your phone speakers helpfully tells you turn by turn which way you need to go and the big road atlas lies forgotten in the depths of a box in your spare room.

Now an estimated 1 billion road users worldwide use navigation apps like Google Maps and Waze, and it's wrecking havoc on our streets.

And odds are, if you live on a once quiet, residential street -- you don't need us to tell you that.

That's because you've sene it with your own eyes.

Traffic jams are popping up on once quiet residential roads everywhere as Google Maps direct traffic down roads that were never designed to take them.

It's easy to forget that our streets are part of a plan -- something city planners have designed with specific functions in mind.

Part of that planning is predicting how traffic will increase over time. They build nerdy things like stop lights, variable message signs or embedded loop sensors to help them handle these changes as they happen.

But Google Maps doesn't care about that plan. It doesn't care about thriving communities, happy neighbourhoods, or safe streets.

All it cares about is getting every single user from A to B as fast as possible.

Now real-time rerouting isn’t *necessarily* a problem. Cities do it all the time. The real problem is that apps like Google Maps are not working with existing urban infrastructures to move the most traffic in the most efficient way.

If navigation apps had never existed, or if they'd been better designed to take into account city infrastructure -- traffic would have remained on the roads that were designed for them.

As traffic appeared to be increasing, city planners could have built new infrastructure like cycle lanes or bus routes to absorb it along those main roads -- tackling it before it became a problem.

Instead, thanks to Google Maps, traffic has spread and sprawled off the roads designed for them and into residential areas.

Like a river breaking its banks, traffic now floods our neighbourhoods, with no care for what it might destroy along the way.

LTNs are just one tool in rectifying this problem. By closing the roads that were never designed to handle through traffic, we can move traffic back to the routes they were always meant to take.

This is only the first step in solving this problem. The painful fact is, there is too much traffic for even main main roads to absorb. The people who live on them are suffering and need respite, just like those living on residential roads.

Once traffic moves along the routes it was always designed to, it will be up to planners to come up with ways to keep traffic at the levels those roads were designed to handle -- by building new infrastructure and offering residents better ways to travel.

We can't just move traffic off residential roads and then tell ourselves the lie that the job is done.

There is just too much traffic for anyone to handle.

We need to disincentivise driving. We need to get everyone who doesn't need to drive out of their cars.

Want to know more about how navigation apps are destroying our roads? ( )

Here you go: https://www.google.com/amp/s/spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/your-navigation-app-is-making-traffic-unmanageable.amp.html