Mostly in the hillside areas with narrow streets. “Residents were forcefully complaining to my office.” It came on like a tornado. “Neighborhood streets that had been quiet all of a sudden during the morning commute were filled bumper to bumper,” he recalls. Councilman Paul Krekorian, whose district includes North Hollywood and Studio City, began hearing from the front lines of the nearly 100,000 households he oversees. Today Los Angeles residents could be forgiven for feeling stuck in the film Groundhog Day, waking up over and over again to a tech-triggered, traffic-nightmare time loop now going on five years, with no end in sight. streetīut Waze’s algorithmic promise did not last. Waze did save you precious minutes…for a while. Early adopters suddenly had a technological edge on those same dummies who pay retail, don’t rewind the odometer when they return their leased Porsche, and don’t know the tricks to getting a table at Maude. Speeding through residential neighborhoods gave hundreds of thousands of Angelenos something they’d scarcely known in this famously gridlocked city-the sense that they were in control. commuter-with the subjective, hard-to-counter feeling that this crazy route over hill and dale just had to be faster. Why the adulation? Waze grabbed you-the harried, downtrodden L.A. In September 2014 this magazine published “The Surprising Wisdom of Waze,” an ode to what seemed algorithmic serendipity, with honeyed lines like, “To me, Waze is the Voice of God.” The wormhole, the ultimate shortcut, the secret trick to avoid getting screwed on the 405 or the 110.
It was the brash counterpart to the Google and Apple traffic apps that took a more conservative tack to turn-by-turn directions, generally providing two or three traditional highway and thoroughfare routes. Los Angeles went wild over Waze when it first hit the city in 2011. The unheralded superhero in this movie, giving every Angeleno the power to take back the streets. Technology has spoken, and you know your supporting role. The transportation officials and the council members and the whining neighborhood associations are mere spectators. Homeowners wake up to find themselves trapped in a pop-up freeway hell that makes it nearly impossible to exit their driveways. But when your fingers brush the keys, out there on the very real streets of Los Angeles, traffic shifts and undulates, like rainwater cutting a path. At night when your spouse imagines you’re cranking away on that office project. You jack in for 45 minutes on your lunch hour. The higher echelons of control come only with obsession.
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