I'd argue that otherwise-sane individuals can be cruising down the far left lane of the 405 at 30mph and then Waze says "take the next exit" because that side street is, at this very moment, capable of supporting 33mph. And you can watch them - and I do - immediately cut across four lanes of traffic so they can swoop down to take an already-crowded exit so they can mush through surface streets for one exit and swoop back up on an equally crowded on-ramp.

And in the meantime, they're causing accidents as people who do whatever their phones tell them to do are suddenly shocked out of their texting, spotify-listening reverie to fuck up traffic for the rest of us.

I'll go one further. Google Maps doesn't default to "avoid toll roads." So a buddy of mine decided he'd take the 110 up from Long Beach into Burbank because Google told him it would be fine. And then he got on the 110, realized he didn't have a traffic pass, dug around in the settings (while driving - an Audi, I might add, to add to the stereotypes) and discovered that actually, his 33 minute drive was going to be 94 minutes.

Either that or he could pay $26 in fees and a $25 ticket.

There may be places in the world where Waze isn't the antichrist. I'll bet it'll get you around Israel just fine. The one time I used it (in that black period when Google didn't have an updated Maps for iOS and we were stuck with Apple Maps) it

A) couldn't find the address

B) sent me on side streets for candy

C) invited me to interact with the fucking thing the entire time in a municipality where fucking with your phone while driving is a $500 fine.

So you can argue that those side streets are "underutilized." But I'd argue that SIDE STREETS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE UNDERUTILIZED and that when we're accepting that apps are permitted to destroy neighborhoods, we can no longer bitch about any horrific thing our pocket toys do to us.