Well, not directly. But nearly! Apparently 2000 bridges are hit each year as a result of lorry drivers following the now incredibly popular ‘Sat Nav’ devices. Network Rail (a British company that owns the rail infrastructure) says that as a result, this costs the Rail Industry £10m per year, with 5000 hrs delays! Wow!
I guess somewhere here there is an implication that drivers are not paying full attention to their surroundings, but rather to the directions barked out by the often disembodied voice that inhabits the Sat Nav unit (I think the voice in mine is called ‘Tom’, and he seems constantly irritated…!).
It’s not just bridges that suffer though – traffic is channeled in to small villages, narrow or one-way roads, and in some extreme cases, the wrong country! I would love to read the story/driver explanation around that last scenario – wonder if it was anything like:
Driver: cuz we were like driving, and like, the cars were like, on the wrong side of the road
Passenger: Yeah, and like, the cars were flashing their lights and s**t, and I was like, no way!
Driver: So I was like, man, I gotta stop this s**t. So we asked this dude by the roadside, and he was like, you know, speaking like, in another like, language
Passenger: Totally! He was like soooo foreign! And we were like, whooooah!
Of course this is just a guess – and it’s quite likely if it were the conversation, that their poor navigation was due to other reasons than paying attention to the Sat Nav…. 😉
[Via: BBC News]