What do you do when rural traffic starts to look like the city? A local Wisconsin Farm Bureau is looking to tackle the problem with GPS and rural roads.
“Living in rural America, we all know that the town budgets, township budgets, just aren’t there like the federal highways. So, what I’ve noticed over the years using GPS mapping such as Google Maps, is the majority of the people pick ‘fastest.’ There are a lot of times when that’ll route you on a township road, and the township road doesn’t know if it’s local traffic or an outsider, so that’s number one. So, we’re getting excess traffic on that, not to mention that they just don’t have the funds for 24-hour snow and ice removals, so you’re getting on unfamiliar roads. And farm equipment, and I could go on and on,” said Shane Goplin.
Goplin says he hopes the issue can be taken up on Capitol Hill, and he would like to work with map makers, like Google, to keep outside traffic on state roads and out of rural communities.
