Merritt Parkway James Farm Road Bridge

Merrit Parkway Conservancy Supports ‘No Truck on Highway’ Warnings on GPS Apps

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The Merritt Parkway Conservancy appreciates and fully supports U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s strong initiative requesting providers of GPS navigation software to add no-truck warnings for roads where trucks are banned. For most of the last 80 years, you could drive your car on the Merritt Parkway with reasonable confidence that you were safe in a stream of other cars, protected by prominent signs at each entry point prohibiting trucks. — text from the Merritt Parkway Conservancy

And it is safe to say that 95 years ago, when Congressman Schuyler Merritt advanced his vision of separating car and truck traffic with a new route restricted to cars through his Fairfield County district he never imagined a future when artificial intelligence would invite trucks to join you in the flow, unleashing them as unguided missiles, threatening your life, limb and your surrounding environment. But that moment arrived during the past decade, and this is the problem that Senator Blumental’s positive action aims to remedy — getting trucks off the Merritt Parkway where they do not belong — by convincing the GPS service providers to fix the problem they originated and have refused to correct to date. GPS software can be programmed to prevent routing trucks to prohibited roads, and responsible carriers subscribe to such commercially available accurate systems. But most free apps loaded on smart phones—now the navigational norm and widely popular—are not.