Wrong locations/cities

[NTLawrence]

I had an interesting thing happen to me today. Normally I just use my gps to tell me how long it's going to take me to get places on long drives. I occasionally use it to find fast food. Today, however, I encountered a ridiculous error that ate up a good hour of my day.

I live in Dallas/Fort Worth. Anyone familiar with the area knows that there's about 80 individual cities in and around them.

I needed to go to a store (compusa), but wasn't sure where it was. Normally POI will find anything I throw at it. Apparently, Compusa never made the cut - I tried "comp" "compusa" "comp usa" and "com." Nothing. I had a good idea of where it was, but wasn't really sure, so I tried to find it without GPS assistance. I made it to grapevine before turning around and coming back - still didn't see it. So I called my fiancee and had her give me the address and punched it in. 2800 HWY 121, Euless, TX. Except the place that TomTom took me to, while being 2800 Hwy 121, Euless, TX was actually in Bedford. And it was 2800. But it was not CompUSA. I called the store to confirm their address, and drove around the area, thinking that maybe I was blind or dumb. Nothing, on either side of the freeway or up or down it. I called them again, and they gave me landmarks that I knew and I made it there fine. To 2800 Hwy 121, Euless, TX. It was about five miles down the road. I bought a GPS so that I wouldn't get lost or waste my time.

This isn't the first time this has happened. One time it told me that there was a TGI Friday's underneath hwy 114. I am not making this up.

Also, for whatever reason, it always tries to put me on the right hand side of the road. I kind of like that feature, because I like knowing that the destination will always be on the right -- but sometimes it will try to take me 3 or 4 miles just so it can put me on the right hand side, when all I have to do is pull a U. What is up with this?

 

[Arno]

Got no answer for you as I only used POI's once on the road when I needed a gas station and it got me to the nearest one PDQ.

Any place I plan to go to and don't know the location I look up with Google prior to the trip (even use Street View for SWMBO if she has to go some where unknown so she is familiar with the land marks).

TomTom not finding a street address desired has been treated here several times when the exact town was not named before the address on a very long continuous road.

The recommendation has been made to write to TomTom to make available the Garmin feature to enter a street address first and have TomTom offer the different municipalities in which that address exists.

 

[canderson]

Arno has covered your "town" issue. Let me speak to the "U-turn". TomTom's programmers have some pretty hard and fast (and silly) rules about u-turns. They include as much as a 5 minute penalty in routing time for a u-turn, assuming the unit believes it is possible/legal to begin with, which often causes other and much longer routes to appear quicker. We've asked for a couple of years that the u-turn penalty be user configurable for on/off, but so far, we haven't seen it show up on any units.

The "right side of the street" is a mixed blessing. I've often been surprised at the routing I'm getting, only to arrive at the destination and see a median in the middle of a major street that would have prevented me from turning left into the lot of a business, and I've been happy to have avoided that (not to mention the subsequent u-turn!). So ... much of the time it's helpful, and some of the time it's not.