Barrow Gurney in the south west of England has roads that are
too narrow for pavements, yet it sees 15,000 vehicles a day pass
through it.
"We’ve said ‘just take us off the map,’ actually,” Geoff Coombs,
chairman of the parish council in Barrow Gurney, told The New York
Times.
Tele Atlas is the company which supplies digital maps to the
makers of GPS systems. It said that it could not just pretend a
town was not there, and that it is up to local communities to make
it clear what roads are and are not suitable for trucks.
Many small towns have begun to see a spike in heavy goods
traffic now that GPS is almost universally used by lorry drivers.
The systems take a driver via the shortest route to a destination,
and maps do not know what roads are suitable for what vehicles.
Transport planners hope to create map databases with
accessibility information contained within them, so that a driver
can tell a satellite navigation system the dimensions of a vehicle
and only be shown routes appropriate for something of that
size.
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