Routed into Traffic

The traffic avoidance may only work when it is red in color.

The manuals says.If a severe Traffic delay occurs it automatically recalculates the route.You still may be routed through the traffic if no better alternate routes exist.I take that as red.

To manually avoid traffic. You can touch the traffic icon on the map page,touch traffic on route then touch avoid.Could use for yellow based on delay time.

A note states Garmin not responsible for accuracy of traffic.The FM traffic receiver receives the signal from the traffic service provider.

Were you navigating to a destination?

dobs108

Yes. And I know the roads. I wanted to see where the Garmin would take me with the traffic alert. If I was not testing to see how reliable this can be, I would never have gone to that parkway and would have taken the streets.

The Garmin has to tell you every time it starts not to touch the screen while driving - so everything that is needed requires getting to a screen to make selections while driving...

There you go, the fact that you knew the way, you found a reason to complain about the re-routing, but for a person not knowing the way, they would think they were being treated as royalty when they heard recalculating, traffic ahead.
Happy GPSing...

The Garmin must have calculated that a yellow traffic condition on the parkway would still be faster than rerouting on secondary roads. One factor in this is that traffic content is not available for most secondary roads - they don't advertise that it is. In doing a comparison, the parkway traffic is known, but the secondary roads are unknown.

dobs108

It probably had more to do with the reporting delay (if any?).
The first time I noticed re-route in traffic was in NYC while on a trip to Boston. It was our first long trip with my new 765T after upgrading from a 200W.

We wanted to go a particular way that we weren't totally familiar with because we had some time. After nuvi plotted the route, we noticed it re-route (or thought we did) because of traffic?. As we were driving we were listening to the radio and heard them start to report new incidents on a section that nuvi had us routed through, but we were in typical NYC traffic and were just creeping along at that point. None of us really knew alternatives anyway & we didn't have a paper map.

It took about 3 to 5 minutes or so, but nuvi re-routed us again, and plotted a 3rd new route. All in all, it plotted a nice guide through a section of the city we'd never been in and turned out to have avoided the biggest traffic bottle-necks.

After that, I started trusting the nuvi more and was glad we had the traffic avoidance feature.

Later in the same trip (someplace north of NYC) the road we were on was red in a few sections and I noticed the nuvi had re-routed us off to a parallel road. It was after 8pm and we had previously seen construction warning signs but they had said the start & end times, and we were well past them so I just ignored nuvi's detour. Sure enough it was trying to re-route us around the construction, but hadn't been 'updated' to reflect the time.

That trip is when I came to the conclusion that the technology was great when everything was working as it should, and when it wasn't.. well I still had news radio and what I had when driving without a gps 20 years ago .. my half a brain.

By the way, I've noticed that here in DC sometimes it routes me on 'yellow' traffic routes but sometimes doesn't. A few times it's routed me on 'red' sections as well but usually not long ones. I've thought the same thing your wife mentioned, too. Not sure what the traffic logic is exactly, but I generally just roll with it.

Do these show up as lines at the side of the programmed route?

You first see the icon on the left side of the screen turn from green to yellow or red which shows there is traffic ahead - with yellow you also see how long a delay is anticipated. When you get to where the traffic is you will see lines along the side of the route - yellow so far as I have not yet been in red traffic with my new Garmin - showing where the traffic is and how far ahead it extends.

I wish I heard "Recalculating, traffic ahead." I heard nothing and it just took the route into the traffic. And I am not complaining - I am trying to figure out how well this actually works - and how else to do that than to try it out in conditions and areas that you are aware of.

And if it takes me the round about ways that it does in my local area when I am in a strange place...

Yes, that's how it works. If you turn traffic avoidances OFF in the menu, it will speak a warning about a traffic delay ahead and put up a prompt to avoid it or not. At that point, you can look at the description of the traffic and decide yourself to let it reroute you or ignore the traffic problem and continue on your original route.

Like yourself, I did not care for how my Nuvi 650 quietly and automatically routed me around traffic problems that sometimes were not really problems at all. So by turning the auto avoidances for traffic off, you are still advised of delays and problems on your route and can choose to have it reroute you or not.

In the New York City area there are so many different ways to go that I am not relying on the nuvi to reroute. I have a couple of preferred routes ready to be used, and change by stopping one and "Go To" the other. I have preferences on certain roads to avoid and listen to voice radio traffic reports.

I use the nuvi traffic info by viewing the list of traffic problems in the nuvi menu. This list must work only if there are at least two ongoing traffic problems in the area. In the rush hour here there are 20 to 30 listed with the closest ones at the top of the list.

For example, a difficult drive would be leaving Long Island to go past New York City and north on the NY State Thruway on a Friday afternoon. There are one of two limited-access roads to one of three bridges to get to the mainland. Once there I never take the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the most direct route. There are many different combinations of roads to get from there across the Hudson River where the traffic becomes better.

To rely only on the nuvi rerouting using its traffic info to unravel all this would be a disaster. It is only one tool of many.

My system has worked really well in an area where traffic is world-class. I have a subscription to the optional ClearChannel FM traffic, and this has proven itself to be very valuable. The worst-case in traffic, of course, is when a road is closed in an emergency with the traffic stopped and with no alternate routes nearby. This happened to me three times in the last year and I was notified sufficiently in advance to avoid the closures before being trapped.

dobs108