Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war, again. Guess who’s winning?
Haha, I thought only Somasandrapalya was a victim of this! Glad to see even cities in the US going through this issue.
At Somasandrapalya, HSR Layout, there was a planned road that connects 27th Main (a wide road) to Haralur Road (a wide enough road). But a big builder built the play area of their apartment in that path. As it usually happens, it is now getting difficult to get them remove those structures. That connecting road never got built.
However, the need for the connecting road has grown multi fold - So many vehicles including big buses of VIBGYOR school go through narrow lanes of Somasandrapalya and they get thoroughly choked in the morning & evening hours. Thanks to the constant digging of roads by various agencies (recently notorious for multiple digging is GAIL), the narrow lanes only got narrower. And then the rains.
It is just a case of a road not being built and other roads being used, right? How is this related to Waze et al and the story linked above? Read on.
(Image Courtesy: One India)
During a recent protest in Hosur Road by garment workers, these roads suddenly got choked even in the afternoon, even worse than mornings & afternoons - And the culprit was Google maps. As Murphy would have it, it was a day when I had taken off in the afternoon and was coming back from office.
Even as I was stuck there that afternoon (5 mins away from my home but could not leave the car & walk), I noticed a few people in other cars, who all were glued to their Maps app! Google Maps has smartly diverted all incoming traffic from Koramangala side into HSR so that they can avoid the garment factories and directly reach Kudlu, which is further down the road. Sigh! By the time Google Maps would have started showing DARK RED for this route too, enough damage had been done.
I was astounded to see a Tamil Nadu State Bus going to Salem in that road. The driver is either Google Maps savvy or he had a bad advisor in a passenger.
And just as the article says, quite some people ‘learnt’ these internal routes that day and have started using it regularly. Even after Hosur Road became normal, traffic in these roads continue to be more than usual.
Sigh.
On a larger note, I pity the plight of the ‘original inhabitants’ of such places (that is, people who have lived more than 10 years back) when they were just villages. First comes gentrification.. And then the flow through traffic too!!
