Beacons help Waze users navigate Pittsburgh’s tricky tunnel exits

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Even before reliance on GPS, tunnel driving has been difficult for drivers.

“As you go from light to dark, you have a momentary adjustment of the lighting in your eye, the responses of the photo-receptors in your eye,” said Roberta Klatzky, who teaches psychology and human computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. “Its like when you go into a dark theater, at first you don’t see anything, then you can see the people all around you in their seats.”

Klatzky said our minds are trying to compute speed and choices — the more there are, the harder it is to choose one. And it’s more confusing when reliance on a faulty GPS enters the picture.

“That may be one reason why people want to slow at the end of a tunnel. They want to give themselves more processing time in this race between the car, the technology and their own brains,” she said.

To show how the beacons work, Ben DeVore, an engineer with Pennsylvania’s Department of Transportation, drove through the Ft. Pitt tunnel using Waze. The app stayed on.

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