It’s not just THAT cell phones ping, it is that they have a consistent ping speed in relationship to their distance. Radio waves travel at roughly 186,000 miles per second as a known constant. The speed from a single tower to the phone and vice versa gives a the distance radius around the tower with reasonable accuracy. Imagine the broadcast area of a cell tower as a circle around it (this is inexact, but bear with me). The phone could be anywhere at the perimeter of the circle. Use two towers, now you have two circles overlapping, creating a football shape overlap between them. One of the two points where they begin to overlap at the perimeters of the circlular areas around each tower (the tips of the football shape) is where the phone is. With three towers now you have three circular areas with an overlap, which point to a single area of contact. This is the area of the phone during the ping.
If three towers can be used, there can be a reasonable level of precision to the location in question. This would not include the highway area with all its fast moving cars, as you have feared. As an added precaution: since we are looking for a stationary or slow moving ping progression at the point of MT’s abduction, we also know the abductors phone could also not be moving quickly either. So when running analysis on a series of tower/phone pings, fast moving vehicles can be sorted out.
Most of the issues that relate to pings as a search tool: obtaining the records quickly and running analysis, there only being two towers connected or less, the fact that the people are no longer at the point you are looking for, and if you are, the battery going dead.
https://www.google.com/search?q=cel...8&hl=en-us&client=safari#imgrc=VrWFnwcjMRjkEM:
