Over the Fourth of July weekend, Here & Now‘s Robin Young headed to Martha’s Vineyard. Thinking she would outsmart the notoriously bad summer traffic on the way to Cape Cod, she used a traffic app to find a shortcut. So did thousands of others, and what should have been a two- to three-hour trip turned into a 12-hour bottleneck nightmare.
For Robin, it was an inconvenience. But for some of the people living in the neighborhoods affected by the bottlenecks, it meant losing the ability to pull out of their driveway.
Robin reflects on that experience, and discusses the uses and pitfalls of traffic apps with Mark Hallenbeck, director of the Washington State Transportation Center.
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