I'm really excited that the towns around here are contemplating making the bicycle boulevard network easier to use AND making El Camino safer to bicycle on.
Right now there's often an unpleasant choice when traveling by bicycle: take stressful main streets or spend 50% more time navigating complicated winding side streets. Making the main streets less stressful and making the side streets more direct should make both choices better.
It'll probably take many years but the local governments are really starting to think about it a lot and there's even some funding appearing.
Does Waze optimize for the socially optimal distribution over the whole network, or does it optimize for each individual traveller?
If it optimizes for each individual traveller, then Braess' paradox still applies even with Waze because all the travelers in Braess' paradox make the individually optimal choice.
If it optimizes for the socially optimal distribution, then it does solve the problem. But this sounds like an optimization problem that would be really hard to formulate and solve in practice, so I'd be surprised if Waze (or any other networked traffic app) did it right now. Maybe eventually?