How Sat Navs Destroyed the Neighbourhood
And how we can take it back.
Like most kids, I spent a big chunk of my childhood in the backseat of a car.
For years I’d sit in the middle seat, wearing an (incredibly embarrassing) safety harness my parents insisted I would perish without, and take in my surroundings. I’m an only child, so most of the time I didn’t have other kids to keep me company. Instead, I’d have to make do with whatever was in my reach. Sometimes that meant asking my parents inane questions until they begged me to stop, other times, if I was in a bad mood, it meant pulling faces at the other cars we passed. But most of the time it meant flipping through the closest thing to a picture book I had within my grasp: the street directory.
We didn’t go anywhere without it when I was growing up. I remember my parents, pulled over on the side of the road, the car shaking with every vehicle that sped past us, flipping through the confusing pages and muttering things I wasn’t allowed to say under their breaths. Sometimes I would imitate them, thumbing through the pages and trying to make sense of all the curving, intersecting lines — the big patches of green and blue that made up the bush and the sea we lived alongside. The journeys which left my parents seeming the happiest were always the ones where the directory didn’t make much of an appearance — when it was consulted once and only once — at the beginning of the journey — and then safely tucked away with me in the back.
I also remember the moment I finally cracked it. When I learned how to look up my street in the index, and trace my finger along lines that all of a sudden were so familiar: the well-trodden route to my school, my grandparents’ house, the supermarket. I felt accomplished: longing for the day when I would head out into the world in my own car, my street directory tucked safely in the driver’s side door — my own personal guide to the big, wide, world. But until then, I would get my practice another way: by consulting the map while my mum drove the car and telling her when she had to make a turn.
“Alright, what’s next?” she’d say.
Growing up, I loved memorising things. Facts, song lyrics, grocery lists — it didn’t matter — I was an only child and I had to make my own fun. So I’d always take pride in memorising the route as quickly as possible. When I read out those directions, I had only one goal: getting us to our destination as smoothly as possible with the minimum number of turns. A failed trip was one where the directions would become too complicated, too-fast moving, where I’d miss a turn and mum would have to pull over and snatch the directory away from me to interpret it herself. I stuck to the big roads, the thick lines, that would get us to our destination most reliably. And I wasn’t alone.
Back in the time of the street directory, this is how most people navigated the roads. We prioritised the simplest route. But not for long.
These days, the street directory is a thing of the past. I can’t even remember the last time I saw one in real life. Instead I, like an estimated estimated 1 billion people worldwide, use satellite navigation apps like Google Maps and Waze to figure out where I need to go. But chances are, if you live on a once-quiet back street, you don’t need me to tell you that.
That’s because you’ll have seen it with your own eyes. The winding, narrow, residential back streets that were once home to friendly football games and neighbourhood chatter are now bursting with traffic, blasting horns and angry drivers. And if that feels like a new phenomenon to you — it’s because it is. Let’s take London as an example. If you look at the data for traffic on minor roads between 1994 and 2008 you’ll see nothing very exciting. It’s flat, stable, consistent. But in 2009 something happens. From then on, over the next ten years, driving on those roads almost doubles. There’s even a pretty graph that proves it.
So what happened in 2009? The iPhone 3Gs was released — basically the first mass-market phone that had GPS and strong enough internet that all of a sudden that street directory seemed ancient. No longer would you find yourself parked on the pavement frantically flipping through identical looking pages trying to figure out where you needed to go. Instead, a smooth and calming voice simply told you what to do. Over time, the technology got more sophisticated. By factoring in real-time traffic data and prioritising speed over everything else, minor roads were transformed from neighbourhood streets to short-cuts — and you and countless other unsuspecting drivers got sent down roads that were never designed to get you where you need to go.
I used that word — designed — very intentionally. Because for lots of us, it’s easy to forget that most roads — even very old ones like those in London — were designed with specific purposes in mind. And while the motorways, A roads and “main roads” we depended on in the time of street directories are designed to move lots of traffic traffic — backstreets and minor roads aren’t. And the fact that sat-nav apps like Google Maps and Waze are forcing them to do just that is having deadly results.
We know this because my favourite academic, Rachel Aldred, did the research. In 2018, Aldred asked the question “are route finding apps making streets more dangerous?” And the answer was a resounding yes. Her research found that every mile driven on a minor urban road results in 17% more deaths or serious injuries to pedestrians than when it’s driven on a main road. For minor injuries, it goes up 66%. Why is driving on these roads so dangerous? Like I said before — it all comes back to design. Those big, arterial main roads the street directory kept us so close to? They have pedestrian crossings, traffic lights, and traffic islands — they’re designed with a driver’s vision in mind — generally long and straight rather than winding — to make sure they have plenty of time to see someone trying to cross a road.
If navigation apps like Google Maps and Waze 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. And over the years, as traffic showed signs of 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 traffic has 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.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. New traffic management schemes like low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) are currently being introduced all across the UK. By filtering minor roads, through-traffic is contained in the spaces designed to carry it — and where it poses the least risk to walkers, wheelers and cyclists. At the same time, main roads are being adapted to make walking, cycling and public transportation more tempting and accessible. That way, cities will be able to keep congestion under control and undo some of the damage sat-navs have wrought.
On that note — you’d think after being such a major instigator of the problem, sat-nav apps like Google Maps and Waze would be itching to be part of the solution. Well, you’d be wrong. As anyone who lives near a low traffic neighbourhood can attest, these apps have made the introduction of many LTNs a total shit-show. By failing to quickly update their systems to account for the new filters, many unsuspecting drivers continued to be directed onto minor roads that were now no-through routes — causing mayhem and damaging public perception of the schemes at the time when they needed the most support.
Complying with these schemes is the least these companies could do. But my question is what is the most? What could be achieved if companies like Waze and Google Maps worked *with* local authorities and urban planners? They’ve already taken the first step by acknowledging there’s a problem. When asked about the company’s role in increasing rat-running on residential streets, a Waze spokesperson said “Roads and streets weren’t built for the volume of cars that exist today. On average, the number of vehicles on UK roads has increased by 594,000 per year since 2012 and road networks have struggled to keep up with this increase.”
What if the companies prompted their users to try active travel when taking a short journey? What if they sent pop up messages saying “did you know you could get to your destination faster by bike or by train?” What if they sent notifications alerting users to the air pollution levels in their neighbourhoods and challenged them to leave their car at home, rather than be part of the problem? Apps like Google Maps and Waze have the potential to save our cities from congestion and air pollution. All they have to do is want to.