Google Maps Sent Drivers the Long Way on Purpose, Without Their Consent

For six months, Google quietly manipulated the routes shown to millions of American drivers, without telling them. The company rerouted people in 10 U.S. cities, deliberately showing them a slower route to ease congestion elsewhere. It cost those drivers about 30 seconds per trip. Google decided that was an acceptable price to pay. You weren't asked.

According to Google. The researchers who ran the experiment also wrote the paper, and the underlying data is off-limits to anyone outside the company.

Google researchers started with roughly 100 repeat trouble spots in each city. On designated days, the app quietly added a hidden penalty to certain routes, bumping them down the list so drivers would take a different road. On other days, the app worked normally. None of the drivers involved were told which kind of day it was. Researchers then compared the results.

Los Angeles posted the biggest number: 4.56 percent faster. Atlanta showed 3.3 percent after Maps shifted some I-85 drivers over to I-285. The median across targeted roads was two percent. Google measured all of this using Google's own data. Independent researchers have no way to check the math.

Google says the detours did not simply move the jam. Speeds across every road touched by the test rose 0.35 percent, and trip times fell 0.69 percent, again, according to Google's own measurements, on Google's own data, reviewed by no outside party.

Google deliberately put the slower route first for some users. It called that "proactively shaping traffic flow for the benefit of society.” A trillion-dollar corporation decided, without asking, that your commute was a resource it could redistribute. They just needed to find the right words for it.

This experiment tackles a problem Google and its competitors helped create in the first place. A 2019 analysis estimated that one billion people used apps such as Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze, each one optimizing for the individual driver and flooding previously quiet neighborhood streets with shortcut traffic in the process. Los Angeles eventually had to make the steep and narrow Baxter Street one-way after navigation apps turned what had once been a network of goat paths into a commuter shortcut. Silicon Valley broke it. Now Silicon Valley wants credit for fixing it.

The 2019 analysis admitted as much: “The apps are typically optimized to keep an individual driver's travel time as short as possible.”

That was the original promise. Get you there faster. Now the promise has changed, and you weren't consulted about that either.

The stoplight ambitions go even deeper. Project Green Light has Google offering AI-generated timing tweaks to city traffic engineers, who have been repeatedly saying no. Seattle reverted at least one change because it made things worse. Manchester's engineers ignored most of the suggestions entirely. Turns out the AI didn't know about the bus routes, or the school down the street, or why certain roads probably shouldn't become shortcuts.

Aleksandar Stevanovic studies traffic control at the University of Pittsburgh. He was less than impressed: “Traffic has so many uncertainties. In one hour, you can have five different goals that you want to achieve.”

Every author works or worked for Google Research, and the public cannot inspect the company's trip and traffic data. Google refers to the material as confidential business information. It released the statistical code and only what it wanted to be reviewed. Nature Cities peer-reviewed the paper.

Google's own paper admits that its users and drivers were unlikely to notice any changes. The average time saving was 0.25 percent of a trip. Your commute varies 40 times more than that just from day to day. Six months. Ten cities. Millions of drivers who weren't told. A quarter of a percent.

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