Ver. 4286 Safety Camera Update Now Displays Locations as POI's
I haven't posted to this thread for a while, as no new information had come to light.
But after upgrading recently to navcore 9.022, tonight I downloaded Safety Camera ver.4286 via Home2 and camera locations can now displayed as POI's with an icon and a value of "0" on roll-over. They appear in the POI list titled "Safety Camera Other US TomTom" and have a distinctive red border to their icon.
Some observations:
They cannot be modified with the map correction feature. When attempted, an error is displayed, "Selected item is not a map-provider POI" - which is the same message displayed when trying to correct fuel stations (vs. gas station POI's). And unfortunately, there is still no way of routing around camera locations, the way one can with toll roads, HOV lanes, ferries, etc. That would be a *very* useful feature (anyone from TomTom listening here?)
Lots of camera locations are displayed, in most of the 48 states, Hawaii and even Canada, but none that I could see in Mexico, Alaska or PR/VI. I can personally vouch for having seen actual cameras at the locations shown in Newark Ohio, on a cross-country trip last summer. I dined in a restaurant there and my waitress was very emphatic in warning me about them, so I was on the lookout. The locals were upset - understandably - at getting mailed $100 speeding tickets generated automatically by these cameras, for offenses as slight as going 1-2 mph above the posted limits.
The Home2 update downloaded three new files to the device's USA_Canada_and_Mexico_P directory:
Safety_Cam_US_Other_TomTomOv2.ver,
Safety_Cam_US_Other_TomTom.ov2 and
Safety_Cam_US_Other_TomTom.bmp
Note the file name change! Also, the existing safety camera files in that directory (from the preceding ver. 4119) were *not* overwritten by the download, so that directory still contains them:
Safety_Cam_US_Canada_TomTomOv2.ver
Safety_Cam_US_Canada_TomTom.ov2
And importantly, these files are still being used: if removed, Safety Camera features (with alerts, etc.) are no longer available in the TomTom Services menu, and no alerts are sounded when approaching a camera (although the camera icon remains displayed on the map).
The new Safety_Cam_US_Other_TomTom.ov2 file is substantially larger than previous ones:
ver. 4386 - 75,558 bytes - 01/01/10
ver. 4119 - 48,449 bytes - 12/06/09
ver. 3943 - 46,887 bytes - 11/14/09
ver. 3852 - 47,195 bytes - 11/01/09
ver. 3764 - 45,952 bytes - 10/19/09
ver. 3696 - 42,751 bytes - 10/06/09
ver. 3674 - 42,300 bytes - 12/10/2102 (??)
ver. 3586 - 40,518 bytes - 12/08/2102 (??)
ver. 3564 - 40,320 bytes - 11/16/2102 (??)
ver. 3542 - 36,239 bytes - 09/12/09
ver. 1077 - 8,349 bytes - 07/10/08
Because of the additional data in ver. 4386 vs. ver. 4119, and the observation above that the safety camera alert system relies on the ver. 4119 files being in place, one wonders if *all* the camera locations now displayed on the map will trigger alerts.
Brute-force testing seems the only way to answer this, since Tyre v.5.5 will still not open any of these .ov2 safety camera files, and returns an error "This is not a valid POI file or the file is encrypted!" Has anyone found a way to display these files in any third party POI applications, to compare the data they contain?
One last observation. I hadn't noticed the corrupted file dates on ver. 3564, 3586 and 3674 before now. Has anyone else backed up these files, and experienced the same issue with file dates?
Curiouser and curiouser!
