RE: Re: Alternatives to autoroute?

["Jon Whiten" <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Just a thought but does it _really_ matter if any in-car navigation product
takes you a "silly" route?  When I get in the car, and I don't
already know
the route, I plug in the address and the Sat-nav gets me there, constantly
re-calculating ETA, accounting for wrong turns etc.  If it chooses, for
some
reason, to go a route that I would not have chosen, am I that bothered? [so
far no!].

I have noticed, particularly in cities, that the route Home-->X is
different
from x-->Home.  Again, does this mater - for me, no.

If I want to travel the very best route from X-->Y then I need to pull
out
the atlas and then do some serious planning.  This is the only way that I
know that I can input my strange personal preferences along with any local
knowledge and experience that I have.

My (out of date) experience with Autoroute is that it tends to closer
approximate a route I would manually plan.  I guess that this is because a)
there are more parameters or options to tweak (road-speeds,
road-preferences
and roads to avoid) within Autoroute, and b) the hardware that it runs on
is
so much more powerful, that it can put more effort into the planning.

For me, I stick with the nuances of Sat-nav as today's task is to get from
A-->B with the minimum of my effort expended in both planning and
driving.
Life is short!

;oj

-----Original Message-----
From: lee.taylor@xxxxxxx [mailto:lee.taylor@xxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, November 26, 2004 10:46 AM
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: [ukha_d] Re: Alternatives to autoroute?


Stephen,

> BTW, I have got TomTom but I find it takes me silly ways.
> The problem is that since I use it on-the-fly, I don't know where it
> is taking me until it's too late. I really ought to check its route
> before hand. I thought a pc based solution would give me a second
> opinion on the route, and allow me to print out and check the route
> the night before, using a bigger screen than that of an ipaq!

Just wondering if you have got TomTom set to 'Quickest' or 'Shortest'
route. The default is Quickest which always seems to favour main roads.
When you have local knowledge of an area, this can often appear to be
slower. Shortest, on the other hand seems to plot a much more direct route.
Apologies if you already knew about this, otherwise give it a try and see
what you think.

Regards

Lee