L.A.'s Love/Hate Relationship With Waze Continues

As L.A.'s infamous I-405 widening project dragged on, the 2010 arrival of Waze felt like a godsend to the city's perennially road-locked drivers. The app's real-time, crowd-sourced traffic information and route generation brought a slightly shorter drive time and an element of serendipity to the commuting grind. It caught on fast: Waze now reports that more than 700,000 Angelenos use the app in a day, with more than that 1 million active users in the metro area.

But the backlash is upon us. For the past several months, complaints from residents that Waze is bringing bumper-to-bumper morning traffic through once-quiet neighborhood streets have been flooding city council offices. The reports come mainly from relatively wealthy, I-405-adjacent parts of the West Side and the San Fernando Valley. But it's not just NIMBYism—the concerns are as much about safety as the added noise or nuisance.