It is more a problem of large volumes of traffic using roads that were never designed for this purpose.
In the UK, it is fairly common for people to have to park on the street rather than have their own driveways. Some local authorities also require each household to have 2 or 3 refuse bins and, because homes were not designed to accommodate them, these are also often placed at the roadside.
All of this is just about manageable most of the time but imagine the chaos when you get 100's of cars using your street as a short cut twice a day?
Also, your typical 'rat-runner' tends to be a bad tempered person with a tendency to drive over the speed limit (typically 30 mph in the UK, which is quite fast enough for a residential street). Needless to say, if you are unlucky enough to have to live on a rat-run you can expect your car to be damaged two or three times a year.
And, of course, the guilty party always drives off without reporting it.
Oh, and if you have kids - you can just imagine!
Furthermore, the supposed efficiency saving is, at best, negligible since a busy rat-run becomes congested much more readily than the major road everyone is avoiding.
I would be interested to see how the use of lots of small street routes around a main route affects the flow of the main route, and what the efficiency gain generally is.
Maybe it is also in your best interests if the street is modified to accommodate modern use cases.
> I would be interested to see how the use of lots of small street routes around a main route affects the flow of the main route, and what the efficiency gain generally is.
I wouldn't assume there's an overall efficiency gain. That's part of the problem: in many cases, a shortcut that would work if a few cars used it causes problems (jammed intersections, etc.) if too many cars try to take advantage.
Someone who knows graph theory more than I do could comment, but more generally I don't think there's any guarantee that a situation where every vehicle uses a greedy algorithm will result in overall greatest efficiency. I could swear there was an article on this within the last year but I cannot find it.
You're under the impression the government does that sort of thing in the us (modify roads to address demand). In my experience that is largely an artifact of history now.
In the UK, it is fairly common for people to have to park on the street rather than have their own driveways. Some local authorities also require each household to have 2 or 3 refuse bins and, because homes were not designed to accommodate them, these are also often placed at the roadside.
All of this is just about manageable most of the time but imagine the chaos when you get 100's of cars using your street as a short cut twice a day?
Also, your typical 'rat-runner' tends to be a bad tempered person with a tendency to drive over the speed limit (typically 30 mph in the UK, which is quite fast enough for a residential street). Needless to say, if you are unlucky enough to have to live on a rat-run you can expect your car to be damaged two or three times a year.
And, of course, the guilty party always drives off without reporting it.
Oh, and if you have kids - you can just imagine!
Furthermore, the supposed efficiency saving is, at best, negligible since a busy rat-run becomes congested much more readily than the major road everyone is avoiding.