A few weeks ago, in a flight back from Europe I had the chance to watch The Simpsons the movie: I love planes for the movies! I won’t comment on the quality of the movie as I just saw pieces of it. As far as I can remember the action takes place in Springfield (Vermont!?) where the population is trying very hard to restore the environmental quality of its lake. The future was looking bright until Omer decides to dump a huge quantity of highly polluting manure produced by his “spider pig” in the lake. As a result the lake becomes contaminated and soon the entire area is affected. To avoid further contamination of the country the US government decides to put Springfield under a huge “glass bell.” Springfield becomes literally removed from the map as it is erased from the databases of navigating systems.
Question: Is it that easy to remove places from a GPS navigating database?Last fall, an article of the New York Times (Lyall 2007), was telling the story of a little village in Great Britain which has been experiencing a large increase of truck traffic in its very old and narrow streets. Just like in many other spots across Britain, trucks and trailers are now directed to these streets by G.P.S. navigation devices that fail to differentiate the shortest route with the best route. 15,000 vehicles a day have been recently directed through this small village by their GPS navigation system which created many inconveniences and problems. Members of the community would like to remove their route from the GPS database, but this is not as simple as it may seem:
““We map the reality — the streets, the signposts and the road infrastructure as it is in reality,” said Dirk Snauwaert, a spokesman for Tele Atlas, which provides digital maps to portable navigation systems. “We cannot change that reality in our database. Who are we to make a change and say, ‘You cannot drive in that road’ if, in reality, you can drive in that road”” (Lyall 2007).
The “reality” of Tele Atlas is obviously different from the reality of the residents – who experienced many incidents over the last few months- which is also different from the reality of the truck drivers. “Some communities have begun putting up signs warning drivers to ignore their G.P.S. devices on rural roads. But signs seem to be less and less effective as people increasingly rely more on G.P.S. systems and less on maps, common sense or their own eyes” (Lyall 2007).
Conclusion: Erasing Springfield from the GPS navigating database – as described in The Simpsons – seems to be much more complex than that, at least according to Tele Atlas. May be it is easier for the US government?!
