TomTom Traffic - anyone using?

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Yv

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I think this is classed as 'other technology' though will understand if mods feel it should be in OOF.

I have a tomtom one XL europe, which is a grand piece of kit that does its job very well. However, I am toying with the idea of adding a traffic report receiver, so wondering if anyone is already using one and if so, how good are they? For example, I drive 20 miles to kingston, SW london several times a week, and on a sunday morning it takes me about 30-40 mins, coming back sunday afternoon, depending on which bit of london they are digging up and how many sunday drivers are of shopping, it can take over 2 [yes, TWO] hours!! :eek: Add in the fact we do plenty of motorway travel to tournaments, seeing family up north and TP meets, it all adds up to way too much time spent just sitting looking at the the back of the car in front [though god elp me when is a toyota :naughty: ]

Any thoughts appreciated.

YvXX
 
is this the radio based traffic receiver? I have a garmin unit which has the radio based info and at times it's very good, but the reception and frequency of updates is sometimes too late, especially for the shorter journeys.

Personally i would have it as it's better than nothing, but don't expect it to be be a miracle cure for traffic jams...
 
I used to subscribe to TomTom Traffic but found that more often than not the info was about 30 minutes out. It was more productive to listen to local radio info :)
 
Hi

I have used both the GPRS version and the RDS version for the last year.

Many times TomTom Traffic has reported long delays (60+) mins when I was virtuly the only car on the road

Many times I have sat in mile upon mile of stationary traffic with TomTom reporting NO Delays.

Never once found it accurate regarding congestion although it is often accurate when it is reporting no congestion, but not always.

Don't know if the ne HD Service will be any better.

Paul
 
Total Junk IMO, certainly the GPRS version.

I had a journey about 3 weeks ago when I found myself sitting in the outside lane of the M40 stationary for an hour when they closed it a junction down. For the entire time I was stuck in the queue (a total time of 2.5hrs for 5 miles!!) not once did TomTom traffic indicate a delay

Another journey I was desperate to get round the M25 to meet with someone to buy a camera and TomTom Traffic told me that it was closed for a junction in the direction it would be normal to go in. As i knew that TomTom was often wrong I rang a colleague to get him to check on the Highways Agency site, suprise suprise - nothing. So I head round in the direction I would normally go and had one of the most relaxed M25 journeys of my life. Incidentally if I had gone the other way I would have run into about 13 miles of talebacks.
 
Another vote for utter rubbish.

I was driving down to Gatwick last year using it. Left in plenty of time to get there. All of a sudden, just as I got on the M23, traffic changed to a 3 hour delay on the M23.

Needless to say Mrs Rubble wasn't impressed and a lot of panicking about missed flights was happening.

Still, the 3 hour delay turned out to be absolutely no traffic whatsoever. Didn't even have to slow down once.

Suprisingly enough I never bothered to renew.

PocketGPSworld is an excellent resource for this stuff as noted above. I get my speed cam updates from their every month.
 
i know it no use for sat nav devices but if you use a PDA / laptop you can subscribe to a highways agency rss feed here or even for your PC at work so you can miss the jams on the way home
 
I only use it before going out. I use PDA with wifi so I dont get charged GPRS usage.
 
If the traffic report is as inaccurate as TomTom's mapping then it'll be sending out warnings of German bombing raids :lol:- they've got my folk's road down by a name it hasn't been called by for over 50 years...
 
One positive thing I've found with tomtom is the (tomtom) weather is accurate so far.
 
Another vote here for the highways agency traffic feed, I used to check it last thing before my journey home everyday (A45/A46/M6/A14). There is also a new iPhone application that uses this data which I find even better...
 
I could use them on my SE k800i, it depends on if it has an RSS viewer...
 
Another vote of 'rubbish'. The Tomtom package that I bought came with the sometimes 'optional' receiver. Not once has it given me any useful information. Even when it does identify a problem it never seems to be able to offer an alternative route around it. I tried this a few times when I first got it - I then realised that the info is pretty rubbish anyway so navigating around the supposed 'jam' is not an option as there is every likelihood that the jam does not exist anyway.
 
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