This is What Happens When You Tell TomTom to Avoid Tolls

I was heading to Boston from little rock and my GPS had no toll roads set.

After Syracuse, NY, the radio stations became french....... I was worried at that point when most of the cars licence plates near me were white and blue.

Down through Vermont I went and finally made it!
 
When there is head on traffic who gets to yield and back up to where one can get around the other.

And you were still within range of a radio station.
 
A1Topgun said:
When there is head on traffic who gets to yield and back up to where one can get around the other.

And you were still within range of a radio station.
Click to expand...

Actually, it was SiriusXM, and it did cut out a few times.

When two cars meet, the one closest to a place where the two can pass each other backs up.

Rich
 
I've been on that road!
Don't break down on that road. If they ever do find your remains, they will have knife and fork marks on your bones.
 
Shepherd said:
I've been on that road!
Don't break down on that road. If they ever do find your remains, they will have knife and fork marks on your bones.
Click to expand...

There's another one even worse off a bit to the Northeast. TomTom doesn't route traffic over that one anymore unless the destination is along the road, which I imagine would be rare because no one lives there. It isn't even technically a road, but a "seasonal motor vehicle trail." This one is an official road, and people do live along it.

Rich
 
RJM62 I was driving up in your area a couple of weeks ago, and I'm a little surprised at the how much damage is still evident (and not fixed) since Sandy.
 
Great video - do you mind if I post this to my geocities website?

;)
 
A relative pulled some college kids out a few Winters ago. They followed their electronic navigation onto a snowmobile trail. Yes, it was a road during the rest of the season. I guess they couldn’t tell where the plowing had stopped?

I gather that’s why many of these Nav systems have warnings about following at all cost. Some just want to blindly follow the line, at least it’s not ‘magenta’ colored.
 
Shepherd said:
RJM62 I was driving up in your area a couple of weeks ago, and I'm a little surprised at the how much damage is still evident (and not fixed) since Sandy.
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More Irene than Sandy where I am, which makes it that much sadder. The whole "downtown" was under eight to twelve feet of water thanks to Irene. They just finished fixing the bridge a few months ago (although most of that time was spent navigating the FEMA bureaucracy), and about a third of the stores are still empty.

Sandy was mainly downed trees and the like. An ad hoc chainsaw brigade cleared them away pretty quickly. It was pretty much a yawn for us compared to Irene. Downstate got slammed, though, as you know.

I was more or less, sort of down your way this morning. I was in Stony Point at the marina looking at a winter rat. But the seller had disconnected the battery so I couldn't do the OBD2 tests. I walked away. I think he honestly didn't know and was just trying to prevent the battery running down while the car sat. But it didn't change the fact that I couldn't pull codes. So I passed.

Shame, too. I like the model of car he was selling. But I have a lead on one in Allentown I'm chasing.

Rich
 
My daughter is in Middleburgh. When the Gilboa dam went, the wave coming down the Schoharie Creek blew every door and window out of her house, but the structure, built in 1854, remained intact.
Then Sandy.
By the time FEMA got done with them I was counseling them to burn the place down, but we rebuilt.
This past June, all these years later, FEMA is back telling them they have to raise the house 8 feet off the ground, even though they ARE NOT IN THE FLOOD PLAIN.
We're from the government. We're here to help.
 
Shepherd said:
My daughter is in Middleburgh. When the Gilboa dam went, the wave coming down the Schoharie Creek blew every door and window out of her house, but the structure, built in 1854, remained intact.
Then Sandy.
By the time FEMA got done with them I was counseling them to burn the place down, but we rebuilt.
This past June, all these years later, FEMA is back telling them they have to raise the house 8 feet off the ground, even though they ARE NOT IN THE FLOOD PLAIN.
We're from the government. We're here to help.
Click to expand...

Between US-EPA and their wetlands regulations, and NYC-DEP and their reservoir regulations, it's impossible to do any actual flood control projects anymore.

Rich
 
steingar said:
Tom tom? Who uses those anymore in the age of smart phones?
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Someone who has had their cell phone map disappear because they are out of range of a tower (last summer west of Portland). Or their company didn’t turn on their data plan for a meeting in Canada.

Both times, the Garmin worked fine, and I prefer the user interface.
 
Cap'n Jack said:
Someone who has had their cell phone map disappear because they are out of range of a tower (last summer west of Portland). Or their company didn’t turn on their data plan for a meeting in Canada.

Both times, the Garmin worked fine, and I prefer the user interface.
Click to expand...

The thing I do like about the TomTom app is that it has amazing live traffic information, even out in the middle of nowhere where I can't help but wonder how they're crowd-sourcing the data because there are very few cars, and even fewer with TomTom running.

For example, I went to the dentist a week or two ago, and they were re-surfacing a long stretch of NY-10, which is a two-lane road. They were doing it in roughly five-mile stretches, one direction at a time, with a flagger and a pilot truck with a "follow me" sign alternately directing traffic over the remaining lane. They used a sequential method: The lead machine broke up the old asphalt; another machine "vacuumed" it up into dump trucks, for lack of a better word; a crew followed with brooms doing the detail work; another crew patched the potholes using some high-tech, quick-setting filler; another machine followed about 15 minutes later, presumably to let the patching material set, and laid down the new asphalt; and steamrollers brought up the rear and flattened it out.

It was actually pretty impressive. There was old asphalt when the crew started, and new asphalt when they were done. It did cause delays because of the alternating traffic on the one open lane, but there weren't all that many vehicles in the queue. Also, that stretch of road is a cell phone dead zone. But TomTom still accurately displayed it as a delay about five miles in advance and correctly calculated the ETA correction, despite what I imagine was very sparse input data (due to the small number of vehicles and the even smaller percentage that presumably would be using TomTom at the time) and there being no data signal in the affected area.

All I can surmise is that TomTom caches users' vehicles' speed and route information in their devices and uploads it in bursts when it has a data signal, and their servers extrapolate it and send the corrected information back to the units. However they do it, it works very well. Both delays (and occasionally detours) are very quickly and accurately displayed, usually several miles in advance.

This is all voluntary, by the way. Users have the option of allowing the telemetry and letting TomTom save their route information for future reference; allowing the data to be sent to crowd-source the service, but not saved on their servers; or switching it off altogether. So it's not quite so Orwellian as it seems.

Of course, most dedicated navigation systems can do the same thing using Bluetooth to a phone for a data feed, and a very few have their own SIM cards and data subscriptions and can do it without Bluetooth. But if one has a high-end phone with a big screen (and in my case, a replaceable battery), I think the phone app is simpler, especially if the user drives multiple vehicles. My second choice would be a dedicated unit with its own SIM.

Rich
 
My car nav uses Tom Tom, and it drives me nuts. It constantly announces phantom traffic jams ahead, and tries to route me off of perfectly open flowing roads. I've not found any nav as useful as Gmaps.
 
Driving in Merced, California Garmin actually said “leave the road” once. This was in a suburban area.
 
SaltH2OHokie said:
My commute with tolls:

1hr 12min, each way.

Avoid tolls:

8hr 14min, each way.

I pay $10/day happily.
Click to expand...
Just for kicks I entered a route I take weekly, sometimes more, that takes 36 minutes and cost $11 with tolls. Without tolls it takes 1 hour and 56 minutes (probably much more during rush hour). I also opt for the toll.
 
RJM62 said:
The thing I do like about the TomTom app is that it has amazing live traffic information, even out in the middle of nowhere where I can't help but wonder how they're crowd-sourcing the data because there are very few cars, and even fewer with TomTom running.

For example, I went to the dentist a week or two ago, and they were re-surfacing a long stretch of NY-10, which is a two-lane road. They were doing it in roughly five-mile stretches, one direction at a time, with a flagger and a pilot truck with a "follow me" sign alternately directing traffic over the remaining lane. They used a sequential method: The lead machine broke up the old asphalt; another machine "vacuumed" it up into dump trucks, for lack of a better word; a crew followed with brooms doing the detail work; another crew patched the potholes using some high-tech, quick-setting filler; another machine followed about 15 minutes later, presumably to let the patching material set, and laid down the new asphalt; and steamrollers brought up the rear and flattened it out.

It was actually pretty impressive. There was old asphalt when the crew started, and new asphalt when they were done. It did cause delays because of the alternating traffic on the one open lane, but there weren't all that many vehicles in the queue. Also, that stretch of road is a cell phone dead zone. But TomTom still accurately displayed it as a delay about five miles in advance and correctly calculated the ETA correction, despite what I imagine was very sparse input data (due to the small number of vehicles and the even smaller percentage that presumably would be using TomTom at the time) and there being no data signal in the affected area.

All I can surmise is that TomTom caches users' vehicles' speed and route information in their devices and uploads it in bursts when it has a data signal, and their servers extrapolate it and send the corrected information back to the units. However they do it, it works very well. Both delays (and occasionally detours) are very quickly and accurately displayed, usually several miles in advance.

This is all voluntary, by the way. Users have the option of allowing the telemetry and letting TomTom save their route information for future reference; allowing the data to be sent to crowd-source the service, but not saved on their servers; or switching it off altogether. So it's not quite so Orwellian as it seems.

Of course, most dedicated navigation systems can do the same thing using Bluetooth to a phone for a data feed, and a very few have their own SIM cards and data subscriptions and can do it without Bluetooth. But if one has a high-end phone with a big screen (and in my case, a replaceable battery), I think the phone app is simpler, especially if the user drives multiple vehicles. My second choice would be a dedicated unit with its own SIM.

Rich
Click to expand...
I wasn’t trying to bash any apps. Aside from the crowdsourcing, they also get road construction data from other places. If the app stores the maps locally, it is essentially a stand-alone GPS. If the app relies on a constantly downloaded map, you lose navigation shortly after you lose data and you fall off the edge of the current map. Some Garmins systems get data through a radio system and it complements the phone apps. I do use both since sometimes one gets a pertinent update sooner than the other.
 
Cap'n Jack said:
I wasn’t trying to bash any apps. Aside from the crowdsourcing, they also get road construction data from other places. If the app stores the maps locally, it is essentially a stand-alone GPS. If the app relies on a constantly downloaded map, you lose navigation shortly after you lose data and you fall off the edge of the current map. Some Garmins systems get data through a radio system and it complements the phone apps. I do use both since sometimes one gets a pertinent update sooner than the other.
Click to expand...

The TomTom app requires that the maps be downloaded to the device or SD card. I think the choices are individual states, regions, nationwide, or the whole continent. If there's no data connection, all that's lost is the real-time traffic.

Rich
 
SaltH2OHokie said:
My commute with tolls:

1hr 12min, each way.

Avoid tolls:

8hr 14min, each way.

I pay $10/day happily.
Click to expand...

The route in question takes about 10 minutes longer the way I usually go without the tolls than the route with the tolls takes. I really only needed the GPS for the "first mile" on this trip. Once I get on the Palisades Interstate Parkway, I know the rest of the route. But I left it on for the traffic monitoring once I was back on the Parkway.

Normally I would catch 206 from 17 at Roscoe, and take 206 to 30. But as I approached Livingston Manor, the GPS told me to exit there. I decided to try it. I figured hey, maybe it's a better way that I didn't know about. The trip in the video was the result.

I think what threw it off was the fact that that road doesn't have any speed limit assigned to it. In New York, that means it's prima facie with a 55 MPH max. So had it been a good road, it would have shaved a few miles and minutes from the trip. Where TomTom failed was in not knowing it was an unpaved road, which I have it set to avoid.

Rich
 
Just think. I once drove from Fairbanks, Ak to my home in Texas using nothing but a magazine showing me the nearest Motel 6 for guidance.
 
RJM62 said:
The TomTom app requires that the maps be downloaded to the device or SD card. I think the choices are individual states, regions, nationwide, or the whole continent. If there's no data connection, all that's lost is the real-time traffic.

Rich
Click to expand...
That's a "good" app then. About the only place it might give trouble IME is coming out of KBOS right into the tunnel, and needing to take one of the exits under there.
 
Cap'n Jack said:
That's a "good" app then. About the only place it might give trouble IME is coming out of KBOS right into the tunnel, and needing to take one of the exits under there.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I like it. I've tried pretty much all of them, and it's the one I've found most reliable in general.

I've noticed that it actually does estimate one's position in a tunnel. I don't know if it uses the phone's accelerometers (which seems unlikely because I don't think they're sensitive enough for inertial guidance) or just estimates the location based on known speeds of users entering and leaving the tunnel. I don't know if it actually navigates, though, because I've never been in a situation in which there were exits from a tunnel or other covered road. Maybe I'll drive to Boston some day to find out.

Rich
 
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