Waze invades the small roads, municipalities are taking control

From memory of residents, never the Lautagne plateau, in the heights of Valence (Drôme), had known such a stir-household. Three years ago, during the Ascension Bridge, a flood of cars and motorhomes invaded the rural roads of this residential and commercial area. Cap south and its sun! From weekends to weekend, the vehicle parade continued. So that the gendarmes had to intervene in front of the caravans which blocked the passage of local farmers, exasperated aboard their combine.

The manager? The famous Waze guidance application. Designed by an Israeli company, this navigation assistant maps the territory and indicates the fastest traffic route. Users can permanently improve it by signaling road works or the presence of the police. Extremely popular, the digital tool has 140 million registrants worldwide, including 17 million in France. However, some villages came to curse him, accusing him of having wiped out their tranquility. Because Waze proposes to go through departmental or municipal roads in order to bypass the bottled axes. In recent years, some town halls therefore have resulted in finding strategies to force the application to deflect its journey. Example in Valencia: “Last year, we set up barriers in front of the tracks of the Plateau de Lautagne, testifies Laurent Monnet, assistant in charge, among others, of traffic. They are closed during crowds and only residents can open them with a key. »»

Slowders and stops

For other municipalities, the situation is more complex. In Camphin-en-Carembault (North), in French Flanders, it is impossible to close the section of the departmental 925 which crosses this town of 1,700 inhabitants. However, an inexhaustible procession of Dutch motorhomes, of Lithuanian and Romanian trucks circulates there to bypass the very busy A1 motorway. For years, the inhabitants could barely cross the pedestrian passage and some even thought of moving, no longer being able to noise and pollution. The mayor of Camphin, Matthieu Lestoy, first tried to contact the Waze platform. Without success.

“I understood that, to stop the infernal machine, it was necessary to take the application to its own game.” The municipality installed slowers and stop panels all along the track, thus forcing the cars to stop the space for a few seconds. This time was sufficient for Waze to classify the area in red and suggest an alternative. In fact, the cunning was diabolically effective since traffic increased from 14,000 to 12,000 vehicles per day in the village.

Unique new senses

At the other end of France, the town hall of Bègles – 32,000 souls in the suburbs of Bordeaux (Gironde) – chose a more radical solution. In 2021, she asked for a design firm (total cost of the operation: a large envelope of 80,000 euros) in order to complicate the lives of motorists in its small streets lined with stone houses. “We have put several axes in one direction to change the cars’ traffic plan, explains Pierre Ouallet, assistant to the ecological transition. An elementary school is on one of the arteries and some were driving too quickly, too dangerously. Now you have to take a more winding route, in the shape of a snail. »»

Rather than driving 600 m in the neighborhood, drivers must now travel a kilometer. The Waze application had to recalculate its route. The surrounding municipalities may not have appreciated …