Sat Navs tackling traffic jams

DUTR

Nine_Lives wrote: »

Heading back from the Trafford Centre on Friday & i got stuck in a jam.

Do these Sat Navs really take you the best route & work around traffic jams? I've never had one that's done it.

I had a budget NavMan SatNav i think it was.

I have the TomTom app for iPhone as well as CoPilot Live.

A SatNav that tells you - this route is the shortest, but there's a jam & if you stick on it you'll take 3 hours, however if you nip off here, it's an extra 20 miles, but the total journey will be 2 hours.

Although this is a money saving site, the subscription services certainly from TT are good, was about £30 per year, so depends on your mileage really, but when I subscribed it saved me time twice a month and that was just a 6 mile cross city journey, I have not re-subscribed for a while but that was with a TT1 V2 and using data from my mobile phone. The ones via FM TMC often only cover motorways and trunk roads, the TT one covers roads within towns and cities too :cool:

Nine_Lives

TBH it'd have to be a free or a very cheap service as i simply don't do the mileage to warrant a costly service. I only do around 6k per year & not much of that is motorway.


Regards Google Nav -

I downloaded this as people on forums were raving about it. My thoughts on it? Absolute CRAP! It wouldn't let me navigate to a road in town to test it out. Not only that, but it wouldn't even search for town. Lancaster apparently doesn't exist. Neither does Kilmarnock it seems. Both reasonably sized areas. However a very small area the wife's folks live in - Hurlford, just outside of Kilmarnock is found, however the street wasn't.

Very poor imo.

Gloomendoom

Sgt_Pepper wrote: »

Not everyone knows the whole country like the back of their hand.

Or even other countries.

Stooby2

The problem with TT is that the jam has to have been reported or detected and passed onto their servers - which can take a while. On a busy day motorway queues can build up very rapidly and your Tomtom might not get to hear about before you reach the queue.

I've used the option and found it worked from time to time, but would get caught out by the very recent jams.

ozvaldinho

I use TT live all the time and it saves me hours of driving each week.

The system doesn't need people to report jams...it works off anonymous mobile phone signals from the Vodafone network to track speeds.

While not perfect, it's certainly much better than using RDS, local radio stations and radio 2.

Gridlocked urban areas can cause SNAFU going round in circles situations.

One thing which is a bit cranky at the moment is the IQ routes which supposedly plans better routes depending on the time of day. I regularly beat it by ten minutes on my commute into central london with a little knowledge.

vikingaero

Stooby2 wrote: »

The problem with TT is that the jam has to have been reported or detected and passed onto their servers - which can take a while. On a busy day motorway queues can build up very rapidly and your Tomtom might not get to hear about before you reach the queue.

I've used the option and found it worked from time to time, but would get caught out by the very recent jams.

Not true. As Ozvaldinho has stated it uses real time anon tracking of Vodafone SIMs to detect jams. Even so it only works 50-60% of the time in my experience.

Stooby2

It still takes time for the info to be analysed, assessed and delivered to the servers and then your Tomtom. And in that time, you're joining the rear of a mile long queue.