Routing and weather

[tweetiepooh]

Just got a Garmin 2390 and paid for the extended weather service that shows road conditions.

How ever now confirmed with Garmin that the routing doesn't take that weather information into account when making routing choices and that just seems silly to me.

My new workplace has 2 main route types a longer motorway journey and a shorted cross country. Already annoyed the unit prefers single track country roads where although limit is 60 you can't really do that speed. (The online TomTom uses a different cross country route with bigger roads and that seems faster.) The Garmin doesn't use the motorway at all at any time.

What concerns me is that it may try to send me down country roads even when icy/snow would make that route less than desirable to a motorway that even with traffic is actually passable/usable. One route is liable to flooding and I bet the Garmin won't know about that either until I get there.

Don't know if TomTom or other units do take weather into account, they really should.

[Andy_P]

To be honest, I don't think GENERALISED re-routing due to weather conditions is possible with today's technology.
Normal consumer sat-navs have no built-in idea of how a particular road would cope in bad weather.
For instance, they have no data at all for the height, slope, prevailing wind, surrounding countryside, etc. of any roads, so they couldn't make a value judgement about how particular weather might affect those roads.

Currently they can only depend on specific incidents being reported to them by TomTom's LIVE Traffic or the Garmin equivalent (if there is one).
In those cases, once a particular weather incident makes a road congested or blocked, TomTom's routing would recalculate around it.
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"Settling in nicely" ;-)

[tweetiepooh]

But if you have an "Advanced Weather" that knows about snow and ice then surely the routing can be set to avoid smaller rural roads?

It may not definitively know that such roads are affected but could make a pretty good guess.

Garmin doesn't seem to have a community reporting just senses speeds and if there is nothing stationary assumes it's all OK.

And surely roads closed by weather is even more important outside the UK which is pretty temperate in climate.

[Andy_P]

I'm talking blind here, as I don't know what the Garmin package actually delivers, but I do know the last time I had to drive home in appalling snow, the motorway was blocked, but I could make it home because my TomTom DID tell me to go down the minor rural roads.
So I don't think there's a perfect solution for all eventualities.

I think what I'm trying to say is that on the TomTom at least, the "Traffic" service gives details for individual roads (and will affect the navigation and routing), but the "Weather " service is much more for general info over wider areas.
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"Settling in nicely" ;-)

[lbendlin]

One of my pet peeves is that the weather services mostly inform you about the weather at your current location, and fail to even show the weather along the route according to the anticipated trip timing. Which is pretty much the same with the traffic messages - I don't care about the conditions at the destination _now_ - I want to know what the traffic will be like when I am _there_...
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Lutz

Report Map Errors here:
TomTom/TeleAtlas NAVTEQ

[Andy_P]

[lbendlin]

last summer I did a trip in a camper van up the east coast. On a friday afternoon. The TomTom told me there was a 10 minute traffic jam on the highway in front of me. I spent four hours (!) in that ten minute delay. I was basically part of the delay, as it slowly moved up north.

Straw, meet camel back. Camel back, meet straw.
_________________
Lutz

Report Map Errors here:
TomTom/TeleAtlas NAVTEQ

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