Holiday Experience/One Track Roads

Joined
Apr 16, 2012
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39
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United Kingdom
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Go Live 1005 World
Previously, when I have read of people being led through little used routes by their GPS, I have tended to put it down to human error. In the 10 years or so that I have used (Garmin) GPS devices, combining the driving directions with normal common sense, I have never been taken down an inappropriate route.

In April, I switched to TomTom, and up until last week, my experience was no different.

Then I took a holiday in Somerset.

The bloomin' thing seemed obsessed with taking me down single track roads. Sometimes this was obvious, and I ignored the instructions. Sometimes, it would lead me down roads that looked viable at first, but soon turned into single tracks. In particular, the route from the nearest town (Taunton) to my rural holiday cottage, always directed me down 20 minutes of single track roads, even though there was a route that was mostly A or B roads, and then only 5 minutes of single track.

From what I could tell, in the absence of speed restrictions on these single track roads, it was treating them as 60mph. The sensible A-road route was longer in miles, and - according to TomTom - minutes longer in travel time. In fact, the longer route was far quicker, due to the winding single-track (with passing points) nature of the short route. Not to mention a lot less scary.

On my Garmin Quest, there was a specific setting not to use un-named roads unless they were the only possible route. In fact it allowed me to "weight" motorways, A roads, B roads and unnamed roads for preference in routing. But as far as I can see, the TomTom 1005 has no such setting.

Am I missing something?
 
I already had unpaved roads unselected.

These roads are perfectly finished country roads. They are simply only one car wide, with passing places every now and then. Which means if you meet a car (or a tractor) coming the other way, one of you have to reverse to the nearest passing point.

More to the point, these particular roads were winding, with high hedges either side, which meant that I was seldom getting above 20 mph, in case something came round the corner in the other direction.
 
Unpaved roads, maybe?

That's where the problem lies; they 'blacktop' abd therefore not unpaved. Same problem in Cornwall, Devon and some areas of France.
The point about speed limits is intriguing, I'll try it next time we take the caravan to the West Country.
 
Doesn't seem unreasonable to me that a GPS could restrict routes to minimum use of undesignated roads, irrespective of the road surface - in the UK, this would be roads without an M, A or B classification. As I say, my ancient Garmin did this without problems.
 
The point about speed limits is intriguing, I'll try it next time we take the caravan to the West Country.
On some of these little roads, there were speed limits posted - usually coming into villages. When this happened, the TomTom gave the correct speed. On other roads, without posted speed limits, the TomTom displayed nothing, which is fair enough; although I wonder what they were using in their routing calculation.

However, on other single-track roads, otherwise identical, the TomTom displayed 60mph, even though that speed would have been near-suicidal.

I wish I had noted the exact places, but at the time I was more concerned with getting to my destination.
 
First item: where there are no limits posted or the data has yet to be captured, there are default speeds used based upon internal classification of the road. For the smaller roads, which would include a rural track, I recall it being 25mph.

The second item: governmental bodies often create 'default' speeds for unposted roads. In towns here, that's often displayed as you enter the town limits. On highways, they're established state by state here. Any chance the county you were traveling has a 60mph default for non-town roads, however suicidal that might be for some of them?
 
So, for non-A/B roads on the route reviewing against the appropriate OS map is the solution (tho' I think the large-scale Philips map shows unclassified roads)?
 
All my TomToms have always loved taking me down tiny country lanes, often taking me off a major road and then back onto it a few miles further on, just to just cut the corner off the route (no I don't have it set to "shortest" routing).

My wife laughingly refers to them as "TomTom routes" and it's become a family joke.

I just relax and enjoy the ride as I'm usually on a recreational trip, but I can see how annoying it must be if you live or work in an area like that.
 

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