Is USA HD Traffic already on?

[mvl]

I was looking at the traffic map on my GO 740 LIVE this afternoon, and there was a significant improvement on side roads alerts.

It rerouted me around a routine jam on a no-trucks-allowed road, where it always had missed the jam in the past. (Of course this could have just been a 1-time thing.)

I'm wondering if perhaps HD traffic is now turned on.

Did anyone else notice a significant improvement in traffic quality this afternoon? Did anyone get stuck in a jam that LIVE traffic missed? (on the iPhone, XL340 LIVE, or GO740LIVE)

 

[gatorguy]

Supposedly won't be active until the summer, and data gathered from those new 2505 Live's won't be shared with with any other live models, other 2505's only, indicating ONLY those 2505's will receive 'HDTraffic". I think what you saw was a fluke.

 

[mvl]

So Tomtom's going to have 3 American servers? Plus, LIVE-HD, and LIVE-nonHD?

Yikes.... they can't keep up with the servers as it is...

 

[canderson]

Did anyone else notice a significant improvement in traffic quality this afternoon? Did anyone get stuck in a jam that LIVE traffic missed? (on the iPhone, XL340 LIVE, or GO740LIVE)

Wish I could say yes, but..

All my unit did of any interest today was report jams that I drove through at 65mph. In the Denver area, even Live traffic is pretty far behind the reality.

 

[gatorguy]

And again TomTom's marketing goes overboard. Their latest claim of 12 times the traffic coverage of typical RDS/TMC is misleading and bordering on outright false IMHO. Taking the claim at face value, that would equate to 6 million miles of American traffic coverage, 500,000 TMC miles x12. That's interesting since there isn't 6 million miles of American roadway, at least according to the US Government. Put that figure at closer to 4 million miles. But let's even assume that there is 6 million miles of road. That would mean every highway, backroad, local residential street, gravel road and dirt drive has real-time traffic coverage. Impossible. So what are they really saying? My guess is they're claiming IQR data in with the traffic figure. Technically they would have an argument that it is traffic data, thus wherever they have sufficient input, there's traffic coverage. But that's not what most of us mean when we discuss traffic. And certain that TomTom knows that. In my opinion making a claim like this is borderline false, and minimally intended to mislead. Just like their claim of "One million more miles than competitors maps", TomToms's HDTraffic press release is another example of intentional over-reaching by fluffing the actual facts. IMHO, they're developing a pattern of making unclear statements using undisclosed statistics to post supposed factual statements that they hope potential buyers take at face value.

Anyway, sorry for the somewhat long diatribe. Just wanted to get that off my chest. I don't like seeing consumers made fools of, as tho we're just too dumb to recognize the truth.

 

[canderson]

At least locally, I'd guess that they are running about 3X the coverage of RDS-TMC. Live picks up a fair number of the larger non-highway commuting roads and an additional selection of more minor highways.

What I can't understand is how the "Live" data is sometimes a good hour behind reality on major in-town interstate segments in terms of creation/removal of various traffic jams within a major metro area. I'm either completely misunderstanding how they're acquiring that data, or their servers are horrible at processing and updating that data for the Live users.

 

[gatorguy]

And had they claimed three times the coverage, that might be believable. Curious who they'll be sourcing the majority of traffic info from, but perhaps there's no provider change at all. It won't be TomTom Live devices tho. There's not enough of them.

 

[mvl]

For what it's worth, the GO 740 LIVE routed me around previously missed traffic this morning too.

So it's 2 for 2 for me on improvements since the announcement.

 

[canderson]

And had they claimed three times the coverage, that might be believable. Curious who they'll be sourcing the majority of traffic info from, but perhaps there's no provider change at all. It won't be TomTom Live devices tho. There's not enough of them.

All it takes is one (mine!) to tell them when a "jam" is actually a 65mph breeze through the area. And yet when I come back 20 minutes later, it still shows up as a "jam" of major proportions. I wonder if they require "Live" info to reach some sort of count before they believe their own data?

 

[gatorguy]

I want to be clear too that by no means am I saying that TomTom's US version of HDTraffic won't be better than what TomTom currently offers. Heck, it might even be the best available in the US for every region. . . or not. I certainly don't know yet. But there's just no need for TomTom to go so far overboard in their claims. If you're the best at something or have a great product there's no need to exaggerate to make yourself look even better. There's marketing and then there's just plain deception. Try being honest with consumers.

 

[offthegrid]

Nice to see some reality brought into TomTom's vague product claims.

TomTom apparently told GPS Business News that they will have a few hundred thousand probes along with the IQ Routes data and incident data. That is less than 10 percent of what Google has plus Google has 140 million cell phone triangulations to go with their gps probes. Its maybe 15% of what Inrix has.

A General Motors study on the number of gps probes needed for accurate traffic flow data stated that 3-5 million are necessary for highways and 10 million total are necessary for secondary roads. Google is the only one close to that.

Any 'live' traffic data they use now is from TrafficCast and that coverage can be seen on Yahoo Maps at least till Yahoo switches to OVI which should be soon.

 

[mvl]

A General Motors study on the number of gps probes needed for accurate traffic flow data stated that 3-5 million are necessary for highways and 10 million total are necessary for secondary roads. Google is the only one close to that.

My suspicion is that study assumes no historical data. Tomtom does an excellent job on highway traffic, with far fewer realtime probes. I'd agree that those numbers could be required if Tomtom didn't have IQroutes.

I'm still hoping that cellprobe traffic comes at some point. AT&T says in my contract that they will use my cell info for generation of traffic data, so I see no reason Tomtom can't pay for it and launch it.

I had always assumed that Vodafone has some intellectual property locked up, and that's preventing AT&T from doing cellprobe traffic with Tomtom.