GPS Finds Fastest Routes, But Roads Can't Handle Traffic

"This little village would seem to be an obviously poor place through which to drive your average large truck. It is in an obscure, rural location. Its streets were built in the days of horses and carts. There is no room to pass and no room to maneuver."

"But trucks and tractor-trailers come here all the time, as they do in similarly inappropriate spots across Britain, directed by G.P.S. navigation devices that fail to appreciate that the shortest route is not always the best route."

"Parish Council Chairman John Sanderson said he would not go so far as to advocate eradicating Wedmore from the map. But communities in similar predicaments - and there are hundreds of them, given that Britain is replete with tiny rural villages similarly ill-suited for big trucks - say that such a solution sounds good to them."

"'We've said, ‘Just take us off the map,' actually,' said Geoff Coombs, chairman of the parish council in Barrow Gurney, a village that, despite being too small to have a sidewalk, is host to some 15,000 vehicles a day, cars as well as larger vehicles, whose G.P.S. systems identify it as a good alternative route to Bristol Airport."