IQ2 not honoring stoplights

[mvl]

I've been playing around with IQ2 in tomtom demo mode and it's phenomenal.

If you do route demos through city streets (that you know yourself) it's amazing how the driven speed slows down and speeds up at major congestion points, turns, etc.

One think it appears tomtom missed is true "stops" at traffic lights. There seems to be no built-in delay for waiting at lights, although there is the slowing to a stoplight and starting up again. This causes significant under-estimation of travel times through city streets.

Even if you assume tomtom averages greenlight speeds and stops, it still doesn't seem right. For example, there is a 6-cycle (multi-road) light in my area, where you hit a red light 80+ of the time, and the green light speed is 40mph. Tomtom slows from 40mph to 20mph, but then drives right through the light at 20mph.

My guess is that tomtom rejects all home-submitted stop-time data, since the driver could be parked, asking directions, etc. My recommendation would be to write an algorithm that looks at average wait duration at every path through an intersection, and ignore the fastest+slowest 20% to compensate for parked cars. If they do each turn-restriction option separately, it could recognize cases where left turns have to wait for oncoming traffic, but straight drives don't.

Is anyone else experiencing the missing stoplight issue? Does anyone have connections inside tomtom where this could be reported?

 

[mvl]

I may have figured this out... maybe tomtom's speeds are correct after all.

In front of stoplights, the IQroutes speeds are really slow (10 mph) for a long stretch or road. I guess in the stoplight backups cars could be stopped anywhere in the front or back of the line, and tomtom averages the stop & go speeds creating the long 10mph stretch.

In non-rush hour, the overall time estimation is good, even accounting for being stuck in stoplights.

I think the time underestimation is mostly due to incomplete time-of-day info in the 815 map, meaning rush hours are woefully underestimated on sideroads. Hopefully when Teleatlas gets more time-of-day data they'll be able to slow down the roads more during rush hour.