Fix found for U-turn 5 minute delay

Tomtom has a safety "feature" where it adds a 5 minute delay to any u-turn on a route. This prevents its built in routing from taking u-turns, even in instances when they are deliberately designed traffic-flow elements on a road.

I was tinkering with mapshare and found a fix for this, but it only works on divided highways, and you have to do it one u-turn at a time:

1) use mapshare's "Block/unblock road" feature and change the 1-way road prior to the uturn into a 2-way road
2) use mapshare's "turn restriction" feature and prevent any turns into the wrong direction of the 1-way road.

When you use route planner, you can see the 5-minute delay will be removed. And tomtom's routing will not try to avoid the U-turn because of the delay.

This doesn't seem beneficial at all except for places you have already been to, or familiar with, in which a GPS device is useless at this point. I wouldn't screw with the maps for something this small.

Having to do this with every destination is... blah..

I agree, this isn't useful in unknown neighborhoods. But I'd rather not have to take potentially unsafe u-turns in places I've never been before.

This fix works great in Boston. There are always 10 different ways to go somewhere, and with IQ2 tomtom often finds better ways to go places than I do, even after driving here for 20 years. The only non-perfect decisions it has made so far had to do with either rush-hour (doesn't have enough IQ time of day data yet) or u-turns.

This u-turn fix eliminates half the problem. So I'm hoping my tomtom can teach me even better ways to drive places around here.

Based on the quality of IQ2 data (and if it continues to improve), I'll be the first in line for the map subscription once they release it in the US.

This is great. There is a u-turn right in front of my office. When I am going back to the office, I will not need to listen to bad directions. I need to leave the unit on for the bluetooth.

I can't seem to get the block/unblock to change the 1-way into a 2-way road. I take the divided highway and block the eastbound half. How do I turn the westbound part into a eastbound/westboard two way road?

Thanks,

Howie

The key to the fix is that the 5 minute delay only happens if the original road (prior to taking the U-turn) is one way. It the original road is 2-way, it doesn't add a 5 minute delay.

If you are going eastbound, and want to take a uturn to go westbound, then don't touch the westbound road. Use "block/unblock" on the eastbound road, to unblock the westbound direction of the road so it becomes 2-way.

As part of the second step you can prevent tomtom from routing down the incorrect direction of the eastbound road by adding turn restrictions preventing all paths from going down it.

Will this do anything to correct the problem for other users, I wonder? It seems like something that would get thrown out without being released to MapShare. OTOH, if enough people do it at any particular intersection...

My TT is used mainly by my wife and 17 year old new driver. Many times, before they leave the house, I will customize the route to what I know is better than TT created. So even though I know where they are going and how to get there, they don't and the GPS device is very useful. No more phone calls after missing a turn.

(I wish "Itinerary" was more intuitve for thr non-techie, then I could save more routes for them other than the next one. )

You may wish to consider TYRE as a program to assist in Itinerary Planning.

A link is here to a site provided by a member here, Birdman, that has a link to TYRE and an explanation of how it all flows together.

Can the U-turn avoidance just be made a user option to disable or enable this "safety" feature, maybe in the next sw upgrade? You can default it to enabled, but I find it really annoying in most situations. I would like the ability to just globally disable this, rather than going and tweaking the maps.