Bank of America ATM not working

Which branch was it?

Is it in the file? Because that file creation was a major undertaking and some could have been missed.

My friend told me it was The branch at First Colonial and Southall in Virginia Beach.

I did some testing with my TomTom and found that the specified POI

-76.0247,36.85658,"BoA ATM - First Colonial Branch - 920 First Colonial Rd"

will only trigger a proximity alert if the "Warn only if POI is on route" option is OFF. The POI is approximately 63 metres (just over 200 feet) away from First Colonial Rd. That is apparently far enough to be considered "off route", even though it is within the 100 yard warning threshold.

is that the coordinates you gave are for the drive thrus which are in the far back end of the bank. There is no entrance on 1st Colonial Rd. The entrance is on Southall Dr.

Yes, the person who put together the POI group apparently wanted the coordinates directly on the ATMs themselves. This is a variant of the "front door" (IMO, bad) vs. "entrance to parking lot" (IMO, good) debate; one of my pet peeves.

...and the coordinates for the POI are 87 metres (~285 feet) from Southall Dr so

- you wouldn't get an "on route" warning going that way either, and

- the driving directions to that POI will tell you to turn right off 1st Colonial Rd (being the closest road), even though that appears to be impossible.

I will try it with the "on route" turned off.
@versatle guy you can turn right (or left depending if going north or south) off 1st Colonial. That will put you on Southall.

VersatileGuy,

I considered using driveways, but since so many ATMs are in parking lots (with many entrances, such as mega malls), I decided to be consistant and always use the exact location of the ATM when known.

Besides, how many times do you think that you will "impulsively" stop at an ATM? Most folks will decide that it's time to visit one and will go to the menu on the GPS and find the closest one.

Say you're in a new city and the closest ATM is at a Mega Mall that has 10 entrances (they do exist, as I have viewed them on Google Earth) and the mall has 50+ acres of parking with lots of bushes and trees. So you arrive at the mall's main entrance and then where? Do you drive around the parking lot looking for it? Do you go inside the mall to look for it? (Oh yeah, there are branches at malls, both inside and outside) If the BoA icon is at one of the driveway entrances, then you do not have a clue where to look after arriving at the entrance. I actually took the time to check the mall's website map to see if they showed the location of the ATM inside the mall and used the best guesstimate of the location. Some locations list the level/floor. So, if you use my BoA POI, not only will you be able to drive to the closest highway/street entrance to you, you will be able to park near the closest mall entrance to the ATM. If the ATM is in the parking lot, you should be able to drive right to it.

There are some branches where the ATM is quite some distance from the branch and it is possible that you could drive up to that branch office and not be able to see the ATM because there is an 18 wheeler parked between you and the ATM.

Unlike McDonalds or Burger King, BoA does not install a 50 ft. high sign at their ATMs, so I used the actual ATM coordinates to make it as easy as possible to find the ATM.

If you want the alert to work, I would set it at 1000 feet, although there are plenty of locations in the POI file that exceed that distance from the road. I remember one Outlet Mall, that sat back over 1000 ft. from the road, and the ATM was located behind the mall in a walk-up kiosk. You could drive to it, but most folks would have parked out front and wandered around the mall (not enclosed) looking for it and may have given up, if the GPS did not tell them there was 400 more feet to go. Also, some interstate rest stops with faciliteis are located well beyond 100 feet from the highway. The decel lanes are longer than 100 ft., so that presents a problem as well. Even if it were right up next to the interstate, you would have passed the ramp when the alert sounded.

So anyway, all my locations are as close as possible to the actual location because BoA is NOT consistant with the placement at a branch and there are a lot stand-alone ATMs that would be hard to find otherwise.

If the listing does not say "Approx" in it, then you can be pretty sure that it's pretty darn close to the true location. In that part, I was consistant.

Sorry for the confusion... I meant that the directions would tell you to turn off 1st Colonial Rd directly into the parking lot.

What's worse, 1st Colonial Rd has a median right there so if you were approaching from the north the driving directions for the current POI coordinates would tell you to go past the bank, then get turned around and heading back north on 1st Colonial Rd, then turn directly into the lot. If the POI coordinates were at the entrance to the parking lot on Southall Dr then the driving directions would (correctly) tell you to turn left from 1st Colonial Rd onto Southall Dr and then turn into the parking lot where it is actually possible.

Hi metricman.

You make some excellent points, particularly w.r.t. ATMs that are squirreled away in some obscure corner of a huge parking lot. The problem is twofold:

1. Your coordinates are certainly best for finding the actual ATM locations, but sometimes not the best for how to drive there, because

2. The current state of PND technology has to make assumptions when generating driving directions if the destination does not line up with a recognized roadway in the map data.

I suspect that as the technology evolves these problems will become less of an issue. For example, one solution would be for a single POI to have two sets of coordinates: a "poiLatitude/poiLongitude" to describe the actual location (as you have done), and a "viaLatitude/viaLongitude" to serve as the destination for driving directions.

(Unless personal transportation technology advances sufficiently that the "driving directions" become obsolete because we're all flying around with jet packs or those "personal helicopters" I kept reading about in Popular Mechanics magazines ~40 years ago. )

As for setting the alert distance to 1000 ft, my testing showed that the proximity alert _did_ sound when set at 100 yards if the "Warn only if POI is on route" option was set to OFF. That is, the problem wasn't that the alert distance was too small, it was that the POI was far enough off the road that the device considered it to be "off route" when "Warn only if POI is on route" was enabled. Making the alert distance larger would not help there.

I know metricman put a lot of work in to this file (and still is). I wonder if a partial solution would be to put the coordinates at the entrance when it is definitely in a bank/building by itself? Then leave them as they are for say the big malls and obscure locations. Its not perfect (and there is no way to get all files perfect), but it might make it better.

The Bank of America locations near me are usually on the street at a corner. I have given metricman the coordinates of the safest driveway to enter. As for the large mall, there isn't one best way to do it given the state of GPS technology today, as other posters mentioned.

I usually use B of A as a "Go To," not a proximity alert, but if I wanted a proximity alert I would make a long alert distance and load it as a TourGuide. (Garmin for a radius alert)

We all appreciate the work involved in this very large file.

dobs108

Agreed, there is no single perfect solution. For now, the people who use the BofA POIs will just have to learn what works best for them.

I had a similar situation with POIs from another site that identify locations for Overnight RV Parking. The maintainer of the site decided that the coordinates would indicate "where to park" instead of "entrance to parking lot". In fact, in many cases the "where to park" coordinates are purposely as far away as possible from the entrance to the parking lot (and the front door, and basically everything).

After being sent on "the scenic route" a couple of times I changed my strategy: I look up the location on the site, but I enter the street address into my TomTom and calculate the route based on that. Then, once I arrive I can always type in the "where to park" coordinates but it usually isn't necessary.

When I decided to use the actual location of the ATM, I was not aware of the option TomTom had.

If I select a local branch here with the ATM location in the parking lot, my Garmin 660 tells me to turn left (or right) from the roadway when I arrive, as well as all the previous "turn" messages. I just assumed that all GPSs gave the same warnings and that users would be able to "Eyeball" the driveway at a bank or shopping center.

I don't think I will go back and change all 9960 entries though. Ideally there should be one for the driveway and one for the ATM (if not visible from the driveway). But, since BofA usually opens branches on "Corner" lots, that would cause another delimma - which driveway when more than one? Some of the locations are in buildings that occupy a whole block and have an entrancae on all 4 streets.

Just too many choices at most locations.