Navigate to road...

[murphwiz]

Tried to navigate to a road as I normally do...
But the road wouldn't come up in the search box, so called mate who I was going to see, he gave me couple more to try so I caould get somewhere close...
all nothing

I get to near his place, and find the roads are all listed on the map, and being faithfully displayed at the bottom of the navi screen... get to his road, and again there it is!!

Why couldn't I find them in navigate to menu??????

Roads in question have been there for 15 years plus I'm told

[murphwiz]

Found the problem

His postal address is Norwich, but actually lives in thorpe st andrew area... inputting thrope st andrew revelas all

Roll on post code input please..

[DavidW]

The old "roads are in the database under administrative area" problem strikes again.

Most of us are used to postal addresses - and expect to find roads listed under whatever is in their postal address. However, the TomTom Navigator 2 database seems to go more along what administrative area the roads are in - something we tend not to know.


The administrative area classifications aren't always completely correct. One of these 'mistakes' is actually rather useful - "London (City of London)" gives roads in the entire London postcode area. This is rather useful when searching for roads in London, as the partial postcode shown will discriminate between otherwise duplicate names (in London it's common to give road names with a partial postcode, for example, Oxford Street W1).


Because of the use of administrative areas, you can put a council name in (typically district council names are used) and search on that instead of a city name. For example, I can input "North Norfolk" as a city name. On a quick test, "North Norfolk" will find roads in various towns that are in the North Norfolk District Council area. If you're going to try this, you enter the name of the council without the suffix "District Council" or similar.

This falls down in areas where there's a council with the same name as a city or town. You can't use this trick to search on the whole of Bedford Borough (the district council is called Bedford Borough Council having renamed itself from North Bedfordshire District Council a good few years ago), nor on the whole of Norwich (Norwich City Council area). In both these cases, the name in the database already taken by that of the town or city.

In areas with unitary councils, it seems that the name of the city includes roads in the wider area - for example, roads in Wavendon (part of the unitary area of Milton Keynes) also appear if you have Milton Keynes selected. However, I haven't tested enough examples to be sure that this is how TomTom Navigator 2 always behaves (though read on!).

You can't search on county or regional names, just on those that appear in brackets after city names and only if there isn't already a city of that name in the database.


In this case, looking up Thorpe St Andrew shows that it's in Broadland (and hopefully is therefore in an area served by Broadland District Council) - and that's the issue. I am pretty sure that no roads from one administrative area (Broadland) will show under a "city" that isn't listed in the database as in that area (Norwich isn't listed in Broadland and isn't in the Broadland District Council area - it's served by Norwich City Council) even if the postal address for the street you're looking for is Norwich (as it probably is for Thorpe St Andrew - these days Royal Mail tend to use the concept of postal towns and not put county names in addresses).


Just to confuse things even further, it seems that if you select a specific "city", you also get at least some road names from elsewhere in the same administrative area. I know when trying to search for a particular High Street in the Forest of Dean, I get the same multiple offerings whether I enter "Forest of Dean", "Coleford" or "Cinderford" as the place name. In the area where I live, entering "Flitwick (Mid Bedfordshire)" as a city name gives me a whole pile of roads to select that are in Ampthill, the next town (Oliver Street is just one example).

I'm not confident enough to say this is always the case - but it looks as if TomTom Navigator 2 regularly returns at least some streets from other cities in the same district council area (or equivalent)!


It's really rather a mess - though I'm not sure full postcode lookup is practical for reasons already described in the forums. The full postcode database is large and would require a licence fee to be paid.

In this case, the ability to search by "partial postcode" and street name would solve the issue. For example, if I could search for MK41, then Barkers Lane (just randomly choosing a street in Bedford), rather than having to select Bedford, then Barkers Lane MK41, this annoying problem wouldn't arise.



Meanwhile, don't forget that if you know where you're going, you can tap and hold on the map in the Map view to place either the departure or destination points. If you do that on a street, then tap the A->B icon at the bottom, you can see the city name TomTom Navigator uses for that point.

The other thing to say is that onscreen display of place names (such as in the Navigator view) also has a bug - the administrative area shown can be wrong. For example, Marylebone, which is actually part of the City of Westminster, but appears in the database as Marylebone (City of London) is often displayed on screen as Marylebone (Wigan)! This bug is purely cosmetic.


Don't get me wrong - I'm not excusing this mess, just trying to explain how it seems to work so that you can hopefully make it work for you.



David

[murphwiz]

Thanks for that David..

All makes sense now, however confuding!

I now know why, If I select Saffron Walden, and search for south road... I'm given the option of south street.. in another town 3 villages away!

Is it possible to search via first 3-4 letters of postcode???

[DavidW]

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[DavidW]

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