Yes, but traffic calming usually involves some or all of: planning studies, committee meetings, community outreach, and voting, and building & maintaining physical infrastructure.
Changing the app to just not route through there is far cheaper, easier, and faster.
Easier, you say? Now someone has to curate the list of "forbidden streets," someone has to keep track of who's allowed to request additions/removals, you obviously need to add that into the algorithms somehow, etc. So, you're not actually solving anything: you're just passing the buck, pushing the traffic planners' job to Waze. And guess what: there isn't One Waze To Rule Them All - push a blocklist hard enough, and other apps, routing from other sources, will become popular. And suddenly you're playing the usual Internet Censorship Whack-A-Mole game, trying to find and coerce all the apps that are unwilling to implement your Traffic Calming Blacklist.
Spoken like someone who has never witnessed the process of changing streetscapes.
There's a project on another street near me to do some traffic calming along a ~10 block stretch. It's actually a relatively small project - they're going to move the existing street parking out next to traffic, move the existing bike lane next to the curb, and make a few minor pedestrian & signage improvements. That effort has been going on for literally years, has taken time from dozens (maybe hundreds) of people, and will probably cost a 6 or 7 figure amount of money.
That kind of investment makes sense when you're dealing with a long-term, ongoing problem. When it's a two-week problem due to construction, it's completely ridiculous. Software is many orders of magnitude easier to change than the physical world.
Got a crystal ball, eh? Don't worry, I'm acutely aware what a PITA any sort of street change is - just changing the designation of a 1-block residential street to a living street is Impossible (TM), and physically, that's just signage.
I'm not saying that street planning is easy, not at all. In my opinion, you seem to be saying "I understand street development, but I don't do software; therefore if the former is hard, the latter can't be hard (because world is somehow binary); plus it's Somebody Else's Problem now. Bam, problem solved! Magic!" - nope, you just moved the mess to a place it's harder to see.
Or in other words: is street design slow, because it takes a lot of time to repaint lanes and/or add a virtual barrier into the database, or is it slow because of all the non-technical issues surrounding it?
Actually I'm a software developer by day. Polish up that crystal ball.
I'm suggesting fixing the problem in the software because that's where the problem was created and where it stands a chance of being fixed. Street infrastructure cannot be changed fast enough to deal with temporary traffic problems. Attempting to do so would be ineffective.
The problem isn't that the road is closed/restricted.
The problem is that the app is telling people to use other roads that were not designed for such traffic. If not for the app, the majority of them would likely have stuck to major arteries that are meant to handle high traffic, but instead they are flooding into side streets and causing problems.
More succinctly, the problem is that the app encourages using the roads in ways that are inappropriate. It is abusive of the road network.
Not sure about that; I seem to recall the exact same situation in the 90s, before any apps: major street blocked, adjoining minor streets become clogged with cars trying to get around that.
But I think I see your point now: Waze amplifies the problem an order of magnitude. Still not sure that maintaining a list of "undesirable" streets is a good idea, but maybe discouraging the routing algorithm from taking side streets might work? (Seems to work around here - perhaps also a matter of map data quality?)
And that's the error, right there: software didn't create the problem of a closed/restricted road; trying to address the issue in-app means shooting the messenger.
