Last time I used a car GPS, it told me I was in for a 20 hour drive across the northern midwest. Google Maps helpfully turned that into 4 hours, by recognizing the major highway missing from the car system. A highway, I should add, at least ten years older than the car.
The struggle for Waze is keeping their traffic data up to the minute, the struggle for cars is keeping their roadmaps on par with a decade-old atlas.
Waze continually gets me to work through back roads and side streets in 20 min, a trip that in traffic on the "normal" routes takes roughly an hour... Maybe one day cars will have GPS on that level built in... but for now... nope
Believe it or not, there exists a Nash equilibrium for this. There are several papers discussing various approaches to optimally distributing traffic so everyone gets the best possible route given all the cars on the network:
I have read a paper (which I can't find now) that claimed that cooperative optimization had visible effects on overall routing with as little as 7% of the traffic population participating in the cooperative routing scheme. So it doesn't even require that everyone use the same scheme to get some benefits, which is nice.
In the DC area enough people have this kind of intelligent routing that Waze seldom saves me much time. And not all of it is intelligent, Waze-style routing; a lot of it is just that people know shortcuts. Even when it claims to have time savings at the beginning, usually it eliminates those time savings from its estimate as I actually drive.
Sometimes Waze gets a shortcut for me that actually saves maybe three or four minutes...but at the expense of driving down dangerous roads and making numerous turns. Typically it's not even worth it.
About the only time Waze is worth it is when there is an extraordinary event, such as a very bad wreck or a closed road. In those circumstances rerouting can save time.
At least Waze is up to date. Apple sometimes gives me impossible routes (e.g. illegal turns) and has some street and highway names that have been out-of-date for at least six months. Google on the other hand has an infuriating way of asking me to confirm reroutes that supposedly save me time, and giving me only a few seconds to do it. But Waze has a muddy, horrible interface. All these services have flaws.
If you have a truly intelligent system it would spread the load across the roads equal to what they can handle rather than the system now where everyone seems to take the "main" road leading to congestion on that road and quiet side streets.
Side streets need to support their fair share of traffic. Most cars these days are very quiet, barring the occasional beater, utility truck, and ricer. That being said, if they slow cars down Waze will direct less drivers to them.
Those side streets were funded with the same public money as the big ones... and the idea that residents somehow have special rights to them is rather wrong.
Property owners claiming rights to how public property near them is used is rediculous
I think that's demonstrably false... if more traffic is using the side routes, it reroutes to other side routes... it distributes the load across the road system... my route is often different every day because of this...
The struggle for Waze is keeping their traffic data up to the minute, the struggle for cars is keeping their roadmaps on par with a decade-old atlas.