Is there a TT that will do this?

[Jim101]

Bring me back the same way I got to a destination? My biggest problem is the TT will take me back a different way then how I got there.... I use it with my RV and sometimes the way back is not "as nice" as the way there.... I have a TT one.

Thanks,

Jim

 

[dhn]

If you have IQ routing on your map, if you disable it for the outbound trip and keep it disabled for the trip back home, chances are likely the same route will be followed, especially if you keep the same planning preference (e.g, 'fastest') and don't change the restrictions.

 

[gatorguy]

There can be many reasons why your device doesn't return the same way it went. Perhaps turn restrictions, one-way streets, extra left turns, mis-categorized roads in one direction, major highway entry ramp location, or a very small difference in calculated times where even a minute difference results in a new route. Even with IQ turned off, it's not unheard of, particularly for a shorter metro trip, for the device to give you a different route than normal on rare occasions.

 

[sageuvagony]

The thing that I hate most is the fact that this friggin device will try to avoid left turns at times, and just by avoiding ONE SINGLE left turn, is enough to COMPLETELY change a route on the way to or back from your destination. In fact, I even made a thread about this last year with pictures. I'll see if I can dig up the pictures real quick. The screen shots are going TO walmart, and coming FROM walmart. You can clearly see the difference in routes, all just to avoid a stupid left turn

Edit : Found the pics. Can you believe how stupid this is?!?!!?

^^To Walmart^^

^^From Walmart^^


Both my hotel and Walmart are located on the same road!!! I didn't notice the difference in routes till after I did the drive both ways.

 

[canderson]

Edit : Found the pics. Can you believe how stupid this is?!?!!?

Well, it isn't the MOST stupid routing I've seen. The street in question (Apalachee Pkwy) is at the point of departure in your routing a divided 4 lane road. It is possible that your TomTom did not see or believe that you could cross the grass median in the necessary spot to make the left turn on the Motel->WalMart leg.

You'll notice that it DID let you make a left onto the same road when you were departing the WalMart, where there were no grass medians involved.

My guess is that the precision of the mapping of the divider wasn't on the money, and your TomTom didn't think the left was really possible on the outbound leg. I can assure you that it won't (even when it makes sense) allow you to use the median for U-turns, though.

 

[sageuvagony]

To pull out of the hotel parking lot I was able to make a left or right. And even if it was not possible, it would bring me to the next point which many others have brought up. U-turns. If my ONLY option was to pull out by turning right, I could simply make a u-turn. My point is is the fact that TomTom would have me take a route that's almost twice as long and would take me twice the time.

And as far as turning left into walmart, when I took the long route to get there, the backroad led me straight to the walmart parking lot which has entrances from every direction. I never made any left turn. That walmart had a pretty large parking lot. Ohh, and did I mention that the backroads it had me take were loaded with speed bumps???

 

[doctormstein1]

iq routes

Whenever tom tom does something like above, i do a map share correction ussually typing some paragraph but i also go to the teleatlas website. On their site they have a place to do correctiion right theire. i find it takes a shorter time to correct when going to teleatlas site directly but as a backup the mapshare correction is also sent to tomtom. I have done many corrections with mapshare and teleatlas and have gotten changes relatively quickly from tom tom. It usually correct within 3 months or even less. just a little advice. Good luck

 

[mvl]

Tomtom's routing assumes a 5 minute delay in making Uturns (try a route demo of the example in shortest mode, and watch the arrival time drop by 5 minutes)

Because the super-roundabout approach is less than 5 minutes longer than the uturn approach, tomtom avoids it.

I agree that a reasonable U-turn delay is helpful to avoid dangerous situations, and the long wait that sometimes occurs while waiting for opposing traffic, but 5 minutes is waaay to high. 1 minute is a better reflection of realty.

I've been voting in my features thread for a way to eliminate or reduce this delay.

 

[sageuvagony]

I was messing around with VR by locating nearest doctors and such. I didn't realize the weird route it had me take until gatorguy mentioned it.

Once again, TomTom takes me around a crazy circle just to have me avoid making a left turn into the Doctor's parking lot. Instead, it has me drive through a gated neighborhood LOADED with speed bumps across the street from my neighborhood instead of simply having me make a right onto Gunn Highway (587) which is the yellow road. The Doctor's office is located on 587.

 

[canderson]

I was messing around with VR by locating nearest doctors and such. I didn't realize the weird route it had me take until gatorguy mentioned it.

Once again, TomTom takes me around a crazy circle just to have me avoid making a left turn into the Doctor's parking lot. Instead, it has me drive through a gated neighborhood LOADED with speed bumps across the street from my neighborhood instead of simply having me make a right onto Gunn Highway (587) which is the yellow road. The Doctor's office is located on 587.

OK - this one was clear enough that I can explain it entirely.

The address may well be Gunn Highway, but if you will look it up using Google maps, you will find that as is always the case, the building a block back from the street is where you really want to go - in Westwood Plaza. Your TomTom sees the address right ON Gunn Highway, and on the WRONG side of a median (basically smack dab between the two cross-overs in the median on the NWbound lane of Gunn). Since the address puts you at a point ON Gunn Highway (not back in some parking lot about which your TT knows nothing) where nothing but a U-Turn could get you there if you are in the SE bound lane, and since it will do darned near anything to avoid a U-Turn .... well, you get what you get, again. It's avoiding a U-Turn that appears to be the correct means for reaching your destination. Your TT sees the cross-over in the median, but doesn't know about the parking lot entrance on the other side, or where the building really is.

I'm finding that 99% of what appear at first to me to be left turn issues are in fact problems of the TT seeing the need for a U-Turn to get us to an address ON a street, rather than what we know to be a parking lot where a left turn would take us.

I'm attaching a screen shot of the problem.

 

[sageuvagony]

Yea I see what you mean. I've never even been to this doctor's office so I assumed it was dead on Gunn Highway. This POI just came up as the nearest Doctor's office. But again, this brings up the fact that it will avoid u-turns like you mentioned. Avoiding u-turns is just as bad. I've driven with my TomTom and Magellan side by side plenty of times and the Magellan always routes me the way a person would normally drive to get into a parking lot on the left without the need of making huge circles. Same goes for Garmin units. Every time I travel for business, I am given a Garmin unit with my car rental, and I sometimes put them side by side to see how each of them route. To a normal person, this isn't an efficient route. Gatorguy was the one who happened to ask me, laughed and asked "What's up with the around the block routes?" Anyone around me would be like "Why the hell did you just make a circle to pull in here?"

Now, I don't mean to be sounding like I'm bashing TomTom. I really love my TomTom. It has NEVER let me down. I just find it pointless to drive in a big circle and nearly DOUBLE the lenght of the route just to make a small u-turn and then pull into the business.

All of this TomTom bashing I have been doing regarding this issue has taken a toll on my TomTom He does hear what I'm saying. Because I've been insulting him all day, he tried commiting suicide by jumping out of my car window, WHILE MAKING A LEFT TURN! Have you read my thread where it flew out of my window earlier today?

It's like my TomTom said "You want to make left turns?!?!? Fine!! See what happens!!"

 

[sageuvagony]

I'm finding that 99% of what appear at first to me to be left turn issues are in fact problems of the TT seeing the need for a U-Turn to get us to an address ON a street, rather than what we know to be a parking lot where a left turn would take us.

I'm attaching a screen shot of the problem.

I agree with you 100% there. But it shouldn't be like this

Ohh, and here's an example again of TomTom avoiding a u-turn to that same Best western hotel I showed in the images earlier in this thread.

As we know, it's obvious that TomTom hates doing u-turns, period. It would rather me take proper left turns at intersections/streets, rather than have me do a simple u-turn at the MANY available openings in the center median. BLAH!

Here's a pic of the street on google maps.

http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b197/sageuvagonyx/TomTom/routeee.jpg

I just wish I knew why TomTom is afraid of making u-turns at the openings. I think someone mentioned it was for safety reasons?

 

[canderson]

I just wish I knew why TomTom is afraid of making u-turns at the openings. I think someone mentioned it was for safety reasons?

Hard to get into their heads about this. Perhaps they feel that there are indeed safety issues of some sort, and are loathe to get involved in the liabilities of recommending them (although their splash page certainly makes their feelings about liability clear enough).

All I can say is that the penalties for a U-Turn routing are quite severe and overstate the typical case. I don't know which of one us determined that TT assumes +5 minutes for a U-Turn to try to avoid them, but I think we can all agree that anything much more than 1 minute is probably excessive.

The problem I keep running into is that the location/road type seems to have no effect at all on the decision to add the +5. I can be on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere and receive the same penalty as I'd receive for the same turn on a major thoroughfare in the middle of town.

I believe that our "features" list as was forwarded to TT includes the ability for the user to disable the U-Turn penalty feature via a config menu.

One of the most annoying recent experience with this was in an area where there was actually a specific U-Turn LANE provided. Of course, Suzie had no clue about this, and seemed very surprised when she suddenly had to recalcuate a route when I made use of it.

 

[sageuvagony]

Same thing happened with me when I flew to Texas for business. There was a lane specifically only for u-turns which I had never seen before. My suicidal TomTom didn't know what the heck I was doing.

 

[mvl]

I noticed the 5 minute u-turn delay. If you run a shortest route in demo mode, and turn on minutes to arrival in the statusbar, you'll see it:

9:45 -> 9:40 -> 9:35 -> 4:35 -> 4:30, etc.

(On very rare locations, the penalty is only 4 minutes, but I can't seem to understand why)

I'm also wondering if they did it to speed up route calculation times. If you try every possible route, one of them could be repeated uturns that get you nowhere. It's possible that this delay minimizes their routing engine calcs.

With a zero-delay, I could see IQroutes time-of-day doing something silly, like "take 10 uturns", while waiting for the road ahead to speed up. In fact, the more I think of it, 5 minutes is coincidentally the lowest granularity of the IQroutes data. Someone have an old enough backup, to see if this happens on app 7.4?

I'm hoping someone with deep knowledge of the linux innards (mikealder, maybe?) can find this constant in the code and let us know which byte to flip from a 5 to a 1.

 

[gatorguy]

FWIW, early last year I had an HP310. It also had a silly aversion to u-turns on a particular route, Winter Haven to a management office at Eagle Ridge Mall, marked as a favorite. It would compute the route past ER Mall on Hwy 27 southbound for another 3.5 miles to Highway 60, turn around, then back-track 3.5 miles on Hwy 27 northbound to the mall. In June I got my TT930. It also originally computed the ridiculous 7 mile down and back route to my ER mall destination. I mention this only to note that the common element on both devices was the map. . . TeleAtlas. So I'm not sure that some of the odd routing behavior we see once in awhile isn't shared by all devices (ie, Mio) using TA mapping. Since updating maps last year the mall access road is now properly shown and the 7 mile detour is no longer figured. Another note: the Navteq mapping in my Garmin handled the route properly. IMO, it's a TeleAtlas issue in some cases and not the direct fault of TomTom's navigation engine. Sometimes blame is placed on the pnd manufacturer for odd route behavior when in fact the fingers should be pointed at the map provider.

 

[gatorguy]

OK. Now explain this one. On the way home, I wanted to check the location of 7-11 on Recker Highway in Winter Haven, FL. It's on the way home and I knew the poi was placed incorrectly from looking at the distance (showed .7 miles when I was sitting next to it.) Anyway, I set it as a destination and got the screwiest route I've seen yet. The poi shows as being at Recker Highway and Hatfield road in Winter Haven. So try starting from 2099 42nd St NW in Winter Haven and navigation to that 7-11 (Gas station in the poi's). Tell me what you see. BTW, Recker Highway has no median's and in fact has a turn lane running down the center of the four lane highway for much of the length. I repeated it twice just to check it wasn't one of those odd one-time errors. The route shouldn't be more than about 4 miles. Do a route demo and pay particular attention the the final mile.

 

[canderson]

OK. Now explain this one. On the way home, I wanted to check the location of 7-11 on Recker Highway in Winter Haven, FL. It's on the way home and I knew the poi was placed incorrectly from looking at the distance (showed .7 miles when I was sitting next to it.) Anyway, I set it as a destination and got the screwiest route I've seen yet. The poi shows as being at Recker Highway and Hatfield road in Winter Haven. So try starting from 2099 42nd St NW in Winter Haven and navigation to that 7-11 (Gas station in the poi's). Tell me what you see.

Same deal as before. U-Turn avoidance. Yup.

The address for the 7-11, right or wrong (and it is wrong), is set up at 4000 Recker Highway. So we're working with that, as you described above, as our destination. The place is actually RSG at 4003. There isn't a 4000 Recker. But it makes an interesting test case.

Take a look at the 4000 Recker address on Google maps. That puts it on the N side of Recker, just SE of the Hatfield intersection. So far, so good.

However (man, I love that word when talking TT) ... Google (and hence, TeleAtlas) shows that as you travel SE on Recker, it becomes a divided highway about 200' prior to the Hatfield intersection and continues as such until just beyond Jay Phyle Place. I see nothing in the satellite photo that would indicate any reason for them to have called it divided, but there it is all the same.

Right or wrong, that's what the map indicates, and is what your TomTom is responding to.

Note: Google maps isn't as A.N.A.L. about U-turns, and that's how it gets you there, using the intersection at Jay Phyle to turn you around.

 

[gatorguy]

Dang. I thought I might have you on that one.

In reality I realized what the TT was assuming, but does TA/TT assume all divided highways as having no turning lanes or turnabouts? Navteq shows the poi in approx the same place, but handles it properly with Garmin. Honestly I don't recall seeing the same tendency with any of the Navteq devices. But I am going to look closer and see if I can find places that do the same.

BTW, I actually followed that route coming home, just to see where it was taking me. I can tell you that the 5-minute penalty for u-turns would still be faster than going roundabout, coming back out onto Recker Highway at rush hour and trying to cross two lanes of traffic going 50-55 just to in effect make a u-turn anyway to go back the way I came. I waited at least two minutes to get back on Recker after driving thru a residential neighborhood.

 

[canderson]

Dang. I thought I might have you on that one.

Naw, but we've got case #56,392 for why the U-Turn penalty needs to be, at a MINIMUM, user configurable.

Now, how the heck do you log a "miscellaneous" for TeleAtlas to tell them a street isn't any more divided in one place than another? Messy, messy.