Foreign Perspectives

As I’m sure you noticed, all kinds of shops were stacked high with various satellite navigation units last year now that the prices have fallen into the “impulse buy” area.

The impact of that is now being felt locally in a big way in terms of the sheer number of cars going along roads that were never intended for the level of traffic that they get now. What’s also apparent is that the effect of so many people using GPS on their holidays is changing the places where they are staying.

Interestingly, in our area the effect seems to have been to send people along the old highways rather than the new ones. Since the construction of the new motorways, the majority of traffic has gone along them but now people appear to be returning to the old routes and finding that many of the hotels that formerly lived on the passing trade have long since closed down.

We’re at the very end of one of those old routes ourselves and are finding that each morning is starting with a series of panic phonecalls from various hotel owners further along the route looking for accommodation for their departing guests (or, in some cases, overflow from double bookings). For example, this morning we’d several separate calls from different hotels in a town about 45 minutes drive from us. Along that route you’ll pass around half a dozen hotels that have closed down over the years since the motorway was built which gives some idea of the traffic that this road used to have. Unfortunately, with the construction of the motorway, development of our road stopped and therefore it’s not really up to the volume of traffic that it’s starting to get (ie missing passing places and so on).

As part of the planning for the extra traffic that’s been building up (largely courtesy of GPS I suspect), they’re building a bypass for the village just beside us. However, I wonder if it would be a lot more economic to pay TomTom et al to remove the village from the routes it plans? Certainly, it’s never going to be economic to build a bypass for all the little villages that are going to be affected by GPS routing.