Additional Traffic Cities?

Traffic for garmin is provided by Navteq. In version received by RDS (radio signals) like for GTM-25 receiver. Garmin is buying this as service and doesn't collect data or include/exclude regions from coverage. It all depends on Navteq. As Navteq says:

NAVTEQ Traffic-RDS collects, processes, and distributes real-time traffic conditions from a spectrum of traffic information sources across 98 Markets in North America. Detailed coverage maps are provided below.
source: http://www.navteq.com/rdstraffic/

So Navteq is the one to talk to about expanding coverage. They need do sign deal with appropriate institutions to get traffic data. But I think unless they will have "huge demand" from customers to include new area into coverage they will do nothing about it.

The other part to bringing a city or area online with traffic is finding enough stations that will carry the signal as a subcarrier on their FM. From my understanding, that market is heating up with HD radio. Not as many stations are willing to take some of their bandwidth and allocate it to a low profit system when they can go HD and sell advertising.

An optional lifetime subscription to Clear Channel Total Traffic Network includes Abuquerque.

http://www.totaltraffic.com/CoverageAreas/

dobs108

Total Traffic is a subsidiary of ClearChannel communications and is a broadcaster. They get their traffic flow information from Inrix I believe. NAVTEQ is not a broadcaster but is a data provider and maintainer of their RDS service which they pedal to various broadcasters. In the beginning, Total Traffic was available only on ClearChannel owned stations. Later on, they started contracting with other broadcasters as NAVTEQ has been doing (Atlantic City being a good example).

These ownership/provider patterns have produced some odd availability locations. Total Traffic is available on ClearChannel stations in Syracuse and Binghamton, NY. There is no NAVTEQ coverage. Whether or not that it is because they have no interest in providing coverage or they could not find suitable broadcasters I do not know.

In Buffalo, NY there are no ClearChannel owned FM stations and as such, there is no Total Traffic service in Buffalo. NAVTEQ does provide service there. In private emails with one of Total Traffic's marketing people, they told me they get many requests for Buffalo coverage and they would like to get coverage there but have not yet found a way to do it. I assume they cannot find a station with the coverage and/or pricing they desire.

One thing I happened to notice is that the free version of traffic that's included on most garmin gps systems is different than the coverage that's included with the garmin nu link service that goes with the 1690t. If you look at the traffic coverage for the garmin nu link service, it has many more cities that it covers, yet both services claim to just be navteq traffic. Why would navteq include more cities for the nu link service? Why couldn't they just let everyone have that coverage? It's proof that they could provide more coverage if they wanted to, they simply just choose not to. Here's the list of cities that nu link covers:
http://www8.garmin.com/automotive/nulink_traffic_coverage.ht...

It's really quite simple. NuLink is delivered across the cellular network and standard RDS traffic is delivered by local FM stations in the area.

Exactly! There is traffic flow information available for just about every city these days. However, many of them do not have an FM broadcaster carrying the information. A good example is randomly chosen Elmira, NY. Both Google and Bing maps should traffic flow information but there is no RDS service there. With nuLink, you will get information right off the Internet like Google or Bing.

Ok, that makes sense then. Thanks for clearing that up for me.