red tape
Crazy street sign in Lüdenscheid – turn off the navigation system!
In the traffic jam voluntarily – it is questionable whether the sign will solve the problem.
© Lüdenscheid / Commons
The Autobahn is closed and the bypass is hopelessly overloaded, that’s the situation in Lüdenscheid at the moment. The official solution: Drivers should turn off the navigation system so that they don’t notice how they get to their destination faster.
Necessity is the mother of invention. The city of Lüdenscheid has created a new street sign: Navi off! This is an act of sheer desperation, because the A45 is closed. But instead of following the route’s designated bypass roads, drivers trust their navigation. The result: Instead of taking the detour, traffic on the A45 now flows through residential areas and secondary roads.
The traffic planners don’t like that at all. Your planning and routing via the U16/U39 detour (L692, Heedfelder Straße, Im Grund, Altenaer Straße, Lennestraße, Werdohler Straße, Brunscheider Straße) will be ignored. And why? Because it is hopelessly congested and the traffic is backed up there. And that means for smart real-time navigation such as Google Maps: The route favored by the state is displayed in deep red. Because the Internet giant realizes that there is no progress there. The data from the smartphones reveal the current pace. If there are frequent traffic jams, a route generally becomes a zone that is better avoided. So Google advises exactly the opposite of what the planners want. The navigation is now looking for a way for each individual that will lead them to their destination as quickly as possible. And if the traffic is on the official route, it can also be a detour chaos through 30 km/h zones.
Smarter than the state allows
The new sign is now an appeal, but please use the official route. “What use is it to me if I save three minutes on the branch line,” said the spokesman for the State Office for Roads in North Rhine-Westphalia, Andreas Berg. “It’s the friendly advice, dear people, take the necessary diversion. We want to bump into it.”
Helpless attempt
Will the sign help? To save three minutes, hardly anyone leaves their route to torment their way through a city. Presumably the savings should be a little larger than stated. Also to consider: The drivers of the alternative routes are not isolated cases, if all those who flood the area with their cars stay in the official area, the traffic and thus the traffic jams are likely to increase considerably – that Dodging becomes even more attractive.
The sign is a hopeless attempt. The truth is: the redirect doesn’t have enough capacity and Google is only making the dilemma obvious.
Source: come on