>During “treatment” days, the modified routing guided all trips that encountered the pre-selected congested segments toward alternative routes with similar travel times.
Why would they specifically need to route people away from congested segments? Presumably if a segment gets congested enough, it'd be considered slower and therefore won't get picked in the first place?
Every actor acting rationally in their own interest can get to a worse equilibrium than if they were coordinated(in this case, to completely ignore the new edge). There are many other examples of this in game theory, you should look it up.
Because those roads are still maybe 30 seconds or 60 seconds faster on paper and critically they're the major roads with minimal intersections, which all apps prefer.
Why would they specifically need to route people away from congested segments? Presumably if a segment gets congested enough, it'd be considered slower and therefore won't get picked in the first place?