Road Closures & Detours With Garmin Traffic

With my limited traffic experiences, yes. My limited experiences are with ClearChannel, HD, and the Smartphone Link app's Live Traffic. By far, the Smartphone Link app offers the best traffic to the nuvi and is well worth the one-time $20 subscription.

I have a couple of the older 1490T, and a newer 2599LMT-HD with the "HD traffic", but I find that the Smartlink Traffic (through my Android phone) is far better than either of the others.

I also use the weather function of the Smartlink App (I think it was another $5.00) and the combined package make travel almost carefree....

It really keeps you informed of travel conditions and can save you many hours of potential delays.

I also have a Cobra radar detector with downloadable speed trap and red-light camera notifications, so long distance travel in unfamiliar areas has actually become very enjoyable ...

Yes, indeed, the free and premium weather through the Smartphone Link app is a great addition.

It has been my experience with Garmin traffic that it will not cause your GPSr to route around any traffic obstruction unless you specifically tell it to do so.

If I create a route on my 3597, Smartlink Live Traffic will tell me of any traffic issues on that route and ask me if I want to make a detour. I may be missing an option somewhere but so far, I have not found the detour to be automatic.

Since you live in the area Craig, a good test for this would be to create a route from Phoenix to Los Angeles on a GPSr with Garmin Traffic. The best route would be via I-10 which is now closed indefinitely in both directions due to a bridge washout. If Garmin traffic knows about this major closure, it should route via I-8 through Tucson or some other viable path.

If I create that route from here on the east coast, my 3597 routes via 1-10 and Garmin Live traffic makes no mention of any closure. This is probably because I’m too far away. I’m curious as to what you find.

Does the weather show live local radar?

There is a difference between creating a route and driving it. You won't get asked to route around the closure until you actually start on the route. Two different engines are in play here and traffic only comes into play on an active route and has nothing to do with route planning.

With the $5 one-time subscription for Premium Weather, you have:

-forecast
-weather radar (with or without animation)
-weather alerts
-road conditions

Live radar is not included, and my fear is that live weather radar could eat up a lot of a cell phone's monthly data allotment as well as stressing the nuvi's processor which is also trying to navigate a route.

The weather radar can be a single recent view (maybe 0-20 minutes old) or can be animated (from 0-20 minutes to about an hour ago) but live radar is not an offering.

With my Premium Weather while driving a route, the nuvi will offer an Alert if there's nearby bad weather on your route and lets you click the alert to see where the weather issues are.

The free weather (with the free SmartPhone Link app) I think offers only the forecast and current conditions, although I may be wrong here since I haven't seen the free weather since updating to premium paid weather.

Hmmmm... What casuses you to think this? I can't imagine the radar data would stream to the phone...

To me, live radar implies streaming of current data and my impression is that this was what was being asked. I agree that I don't think the app can or would want to do this. From a quick check on my devices, the most recent radar image will be somewhere from maybe 0-20 minutes old.

Every 15 seconds might be reasonable If you we're traversing through an area having sever weather... But that's about the most I could see..

And I didn't get over to that intersection Saturday... Grumble Grumble Grumble... Something about life getting in the way...

In addition to what I wrote above, you can also create a list a Favorite Cities and with one selected, you can see the forecast, radar, etc. for that city's surrounding even if you're still hundreds of miles away.

Good points. Oops I didn't really mean **live** radar. Weather radar with one image taken in the last 10 minutes and a one-to-two-hour time lapse available is good enough for my purposes, and it's easy enough to get that even on the road on a smartphone with something like the Storm app, which is free but also has, I think, a $1.99 annual upgrade to remove ads, and has very helpful radar images. Run only during occasional weather events, Storm doesn't really eat up much wireless data over the course of a month. With a storm approaching, weather radar's just something I'd like to be able to have transparently overlaid on a GPS screen but haven't found so far. There may be a Bluetooth way to do it. I personally don't need the forecast or current weather stats on a GPS. Temperature's useful to know around 32 degrees F in a car without an accurate temp display but coming from another nearby location may not be accurate enough.

I simulated a route from Phx to LA just now and it also routed me over I-10. I may also be too far away since I'm over 100 miles from Phx and the washout is well west along I-10 in CA, right? I did note that when bringing up a traffic map, it did point out about a dozen highway exit/entry ramp closures in Greater Phoenix. I expect that if driving or maybe even simulating the route (assuming CalDOT or whatever they're called has IDed the closure), that at some point I'd be offered a detour.

My only live experience with a known road closure was with my nuvi 855 and ClearChannel traffic. When setting a destination, I was told that the exit ramp I'd need to take for the normally quickest route was closed and unavailable. It was so long ago that I don't remember the options given to me.

Next week Tuesday I was planning a trip from LA to Phoenix but since I only found out about the stoppage while reading this post, I can thank you for I know how busy the traffic is on that highway and any diversion would mean those thousands of vehicles being diverted would be in front of me.

There is a difference between creating a route and driving it. You won't get asked to route around the closure until you actually start on the route. Two different engines are in play here and traffic only comes into play on an active route and has nothing to do with route planning.

Thanks for trying Craig. I wasn't sure if you were less than 100 miles from the closure or not. Perhaps kurzemnieks will give us a report as he passes that way. It would be a difinitive way to answer the OP's question.

LA via Phoenix is 515 miles from my home, so about 400 from Phoenix. A glance at a map makes me think the closure is about 200 miles west of Phoenix.

About 200 miles west of Phoenix is correct. The I-10 bridges are out near Desert Center, California. Detour options in this area are limited. It can be a long slog out of your way if you need to use I-10 through eastern California. They are more optimistic about at least getting westbound traffic going in a few days than they were over the weekend.

I'm wondering if they'll combine eastbound and westbound traffic over the westbound bridges. You could still have a long delay with the loss of lanes but not as much as the detours.

Oddly I don't see anything about this on the Caltrans website at this time. Here's a good map with detour suggestions:
http://www.kesq.com/news/bridge-collapses-on-i10-in-desert-c...

I drive on Canada's busiest Highway 401 everyday. My Nuvi 3597, always offers me detours in the evening rush hours to save time. Some days, it will take me to Express lanes if Collectors are clogged. In the evening, almost everyday it offers detours to save time because I have not selected optimized route to Automatic.

PS: I remember few times in the morning Nuvi offered me new routes due to Highway ramps closures due to construction. So it does reroute you in the even of road closures.

The damaged westbound bridge reopened today to two-way traffic.
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-10-freeway--to-r...
It will still be awhile before the collapsed eastbound bridge is rebuilt but in the meantime, eastbound traffic is routed onto the westbound bridge.Delays will still occur in both directions at busy times due to the reduced lanes, but the delays will be less than rerouting around the area for most drivers.