Nav 6 live traffic, congestion, silly warnings? Stupid routings?

I have purchased a Nav 6, my thanks to those who responded to my previous thread.

I used it yesterday To go to Arden BMW in Tunbridge Wells, about 40 miles from Folkestone. I used the “search dealer” feature and it routed me there via the M20 which suited me, the weather was crap, and the shortest time sitting out in it seemed wise. It took me directly into Tonbridge, despite there being an adequate, and shorter, bypass. I found this curious.

Whilst Arden were doing their bit, I programmed a route home via Tenterden & Ham St. I missed a trick when arriving in Tenterden, I should have “skipped” to the following waypoint, and paid for my oversight with a 5-mile wild goose chase, which was irritating, but a learning experience. It was clearly trying to find a waypoint and was quite keen on it.

On arrival in Hythe, it very determinedly tried to convince me to use the high street, despite the obvious presence of a perfectly good road that doesn’t have “no entry” & “one way” signs - it was trying to take me the wrong way. I found this bizarre.

These two misroutings are odd, particularly as the unit was updated on Wednesday evening, pretty much first thing I did when I unpacked it. Anybody got any suggestions?

The other irritation is the live traffic. I haven’t found out if or how to turn it off or control it. At some points, it was bleeping about congestion ahead, and warning me every 200 metres. At another point, it was recommending rerouting to avoid a “delay of 1 minute”, and telling me whilst I was on the motorway, so there wasn’t much to be done about it anyway. Is it possible to set a minimum time that it won’t try to reroute? Is it possible to set it so it doesn’t bleep every couple of minutes, because it’s annoying distracting, unhelpful, and annoying. Any suggestions (apart from send it back) would be welcome.

Whilst I think on, I’d like to have the directions, but not the incessant bleating and rerouting (unless it’s big & important like the motorway is closed after the next junction) so muting it isn’t really the answer.

I shall try to make some sense of Basecamp over the weekend, the weather’s s*i*e so it’ll keep me amused.

Cheers
Simon

Is it paired to the Garmin app? it can get live traffic updates etc from that, the silly routing, just a case of playing with it really. I look at the Nav 6 as being a great tool for route planning, and keeping in check with the planned route, otherwise it's just another GPS.

You can change the routing options to stop it recalculating, and either ignore or warn you, it's all in this forum if you have a look through.

As you are cleverer than the dumb device. When it directs to you take road X, when your superior spidey senses tell you it would be much better for you to take road Y, then do what your spidey senses tell you. The device is your servant, not you its slave.

Use it some more. You’ll get better at it and it with you.

PS You forgot to tell us what routing preferences you had set. If ‘direct’, then the High Street may indeed have been correct, it possibly being a straight line between two points. Even if set to ‘fastest time’ the High Street might have been half a yard shorter, therefor ‘quicker’ as far as the dumb machine’s algorithms are concerned. I am not familiar with the geography of Hythe, so you are on your own with that one I’m afraid.

PPS I have no idea how ‘Live traffic’ functions.

PPPS With two or more topics to embrace, it’s often better to start a separate thread on each. It saves you getting confused and you us.

Thanks both. I do agree that it is a tool, and the proper use of tools does imply some thinking on the part of the user. I’m happy with that, I guess it’s a case of learning what it will do, and how to make the best of it. I’m delighted to be considered smarter than a satnav

That said, if I hadn’t known Hythe, I think I’d have been even more surprised than I was to be told to turn into the wrong end on a one way street. Is there a simple way of advising Garmin that there is an apparent error in their mapping? I will double check it did what I think it did.

I suspect I didn’t “forget” to tell you my preferences. I suspect I haven’t yet worked out how it’s set.

Yes, it is paired with the Garmin SmartLink app on the phone, and the bike is paired with the BMW Connected app. There doesn’t appear to be any setup for the traffic alerts, the phone has a couple of pages of them as I write. Seems they update continuously, which is the point of “live traffic” I guess. I hope I’m going to try to find out how not to be “beeped at” every few seconds when it updates. I’ll advise if I do.

Cheers
Simon

Google: Garmin report map errors (four words)

https://support.garmin.com/en-GB/?searchQuery=Reporting Map Errors on Automotive Devices

Yeah, that gets you there after a few clicks. https://my.garmin.com/mapErrors/report.faces

Once I’ve verified that it does actually try to route me the wrong way down the high street again, worked out which map package it is, noted the lat & long of the location, the serial number of my device and my inside leg measurement, I’ll file the error report.

Cheers

What bike are you using this on? I assume a GS, or BMW with the wheel on the handlebars, if so it’s easy to just use the nav as a guide, zooming in and out when needs be. Quite why Garmin, and TomTom still don’t have an ‘avoid town centre’ feature nowadays is still rather odd though.

Life’s a real bitch like that. I guess Garmin (or more precisely their map maker) need the exact coordinates and details, or they’d get: “The High Street in Hythe is not the best way to go”. Or something like that.

Have fun learning how your expensive box of widgets works. Once you get used to it and especially when you start to create your own bespoke routes in BaseCamp, you’ll appreciate what a powerful device it is.

The Nutty Duke said:

What bike are you using this on? I assume a GS, or BMW with the wheel on the handlebars, if so it’s easy to just use the nav as a guide, zooming in and out when needs be. Quite why Garmin, and TomTom still don’t have an ‘avoid town centre’ feature nowadays is still rather odd though.

Click to expand...

Because Garmin assume (wrongly, apparently) that if a bod has told the device they want to go to the centre of a town, that is where they want to be taken to.

Of course they could insert an option to ‘avoid’ (there is one already, useable on a bespoke basis) but that would doubtless trigger the inevitable: “The bloody thing got me to within 5 miles of the town and then sent me off down the motorway to miss it out. I missed the really nice road three miles from the town that I wanted to use to miss the town out and I missed the chance of a coffee stop. It really is a load of shite.”

When you develop even the slightest ability to create your own routes (rather than just inserting via point towns in a list) you’ll do much better. If you must insert them in a list, learning how to use the skip function (controlled from the wheel or the screen) you’ll be a lot happier. The skip button will do exactly what you want to achieve. Get as close as you like to the town centre, then hit skip when you get to the point you want to deviate away. All will be well.

SBD said:

Yeah, that gets you there after a few clicks. https://my.garmin.com/mapErrors/report.faces

Once I’ve verified that it does actually try to route me the wrong way down the high street again, worked out which map package it is, noted the lat & long of the location, the serial number of my device and my inside leg measurement, I’ll file the error report.

Cheers

Click to expand...

I guess when I said “is there a simple way...?”, I meant something like When it tries to route me the wrong way up a one-way street, I’d press the offending instruction for a few moments and it might pop up a menu with an option for “report map error”, which via the magic of technology might then be reported to Garmin’s elves, who could verify & update as necessary. “I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition”.

I did just check on Google maps, and that does route correctly for the one way street (which has been as it is for more than 20 years).

I had read the post on here about “skipping”, and should have done that in Tenterden, but the Hythe one way street is 2 miles from my house, I can manage that without the satnav

Cheers
Simon

Wapping said:

Because Garmin assume (wrongly, apparently) that if a bod has told the device they want to go to the centre of a town, that is where they want to be taken to.

Of course they could insert an option to ‘avoid’ (there is one already, useable on a bespoke basis) but that would doubtless trigger the inevitable: “The bloody thing got me to within 5 miles of the town and then sent me off down the motorway to miss it out. I missed the really nice road three miles from the town that I wanted to use to miss the town out and I missed the chance of a coffee stop. It really is a load of shite.”

When you develop even the slightest ability to create your own routes (rather than just inserting via point towns in a list) you’ll do much better. If you must insert them in a list, learning how to use the skip function (controlled from the wheel or the screen) you’ll be a lot happier. The skip button will do exactly what you want to achieve. Get as close as you like to the town centre, then hit skip when you get to the point you want to deviate away. All will be well.

Click to expand...

They have a navigate to town centre option, so why not have an avoid town centre feature when planning a short route on the device?

And, yes the skip button is a good feature which I’ve used many times (obvs ), so I’ll give you that.

They do. They do, it’s called ‘Do not select the town centre if you really do not want to go there’.

Here you go Nutty, here is how to do it.

A couple of months ago I created a route directly on my Navigator V, without using BaseCamp or touching a computer. The route was from Verdun to a small rural village, Wierre Effroy, near the Channel coast, entirely on D roads, about 250 miles in length. In other words, a fairly typical day out in France, avoiding motorways and taking in some decent country roads; just what punters on this site ask for.

I first looked at my Michelin map to see which roads I wanted to take. I then put each significant village or town along the way into my Garmin device in sequence, asking the device to give me a route from A (start) to B (end) through each town or village, according to my preference settings. This it did.

I then checked the route on the device’s screen, to make sure it looked right (in other words that it it didn’t dive off to somewhere in the Dordogne, as I had entered the wrong place name) and that the total mileage distance looked near enough correct.

The next morning I rode the full route successfully.

Inevitably, just as you found, the centre of the town or village was sometimes away from the road I actually wanted to take. For instance, let’s say I came to a T-junction where the route on the screen turned right (just to enter the town and then turn around) when clearly the sensible thing would be to turn left and continue the route to the next village on the list that way.

As I approached the T-junction, I simply touched the skip button. The device very quickly skipped the instruction to turn right, instead (quite logically) requested me to turn left, just as you’d expect.

Yes, I had to use my own intuition as to when to use the skip button. Yes, I had to sometimes zoom in if something didn’t feel right but that was quite rare. As you pointed out, zooming in and out / controlling the device is easy with the whirlywheel thing. I guess I maybe only hit the skip button perhaps four times over the entire distance. Yes, it required a bit of effort to create the route on the device but in reality it was no different to me writing down the road numbers, the place names and the directions on a sheet of paper, as we (or many of us) did in days gone by.

It really was and is, as easy as that.

Give it a go.


PS I could have avoided using the skip button entirely and still have ridden the route. To do this I woukd have changed each via point (each named town or village) into a shaping point. You can do this easily from within the device itself. Via points are points you have told the device you must go through, in other words the centres of places that are causing you such frustration. Shaping points are more harmless, so you can miss them out. Had the village at the T-junction been created as a shaping point, I could simply have ignored the instruction to turn right, turned left instead and continued quite normally. I might have received an off-route warning but as I have auto-recalculate set to off or prompted, I could have ignored it quite happily, too.

Get to know how your very powerful and very logical, expensive, GPS device works. That woukd be my advice. Oh, and have a paper map or at least be able to look at a map on a phone, as it helps no end when planning anything.

Now, can anyone help SBD with his live traffic updates difficulties?

Me? I’d ditch all the linking with my phone and bin the Garmin app, along with turning off and / or deleting anything else that went ‘ping’ or sought to distract me from the easily difficult task of riding a motorcycle in the 21st century. Problem solved.

Thank you,

Yes, Non-urgent, relatively unimportant things that go “ping” when you don’t expect them to, and perhaps at a moment when your concentration is demanded by something more important AND urgent (like other road users, all of whom are potentially SMIDSY) are unwelcome and potentially hazardous. I suspect a “ping” in the dashboard of a car is much less distracting than through earphones in a helmet. And it doesn’t appear to have an independent volume control, or at least, I haven’t yet found one.

If I can’t find a means of limiting it I shall disable it, which would be a shame, as it would be helpful to know about major traffic issues ahead, if it can be advised in a manner that doesn’t distract from the key business of staying alive.

Suggestions welcome
Simon

Wapping said:

Here you go Nutty, here is how to do it.

A couple of months ago I created a route directly on my Navigator V, without using BaseCamp or touching a computer. The route was from Verdun to a small rural village, Wierre Effroy, near the Channel coast, entirely on D roads, about 250 miles in length. In other words, a fairly typical day out in France, avoiding motorways and taking in some decent country roads; just what punters on this site ask for.

I first looked at my Michelin map to see which roads I wanted to take. I then put each significant village or town along the way into my Garmin device in sequence, asking the device to give me a route from A (start) to B (end) through each town or village, according to my preference settings. This it did.

I then checked the route on the device’s screen, to make sure it looked right (in other words that it it didn’t dive off to somewhere in the Dordogne, as I had entered the wrong place name) and that the total mileage distance looked near enough correct.

The next morning I rode the full route successfully.

Inevitably, just as you found, the centre of the town or village was sometimes away from the road I actually wanted to take. For instance, let’s say I came to a T-junction where the route on the screen turned right (just to enter the town and then turn around) but clearly the sensible thing would be to turn left and continue the route to the next village on the list that way.

As I approached the T-junction, I simply touched the skip button. The device very quickly skipped the instruction to turn right, instead (quite logically) requested me to turn left, just as you’d expect.

Yes, I had to use my own intuition as to when to use the skip button. Yes, I had to sometimes zoom in if something didn’t feel right but that was quite rare. As you pointed out, zooming in and out / controlling the device is easy with the whirlywheel thing. I guess I maybe only hit the skip button perhaps four times over the entire distance. Yes, it required a bit of effort to create the route on the device but in reality it was no different to me writing down the road numbers, the place names and the directions on a sheet of paper, as we (or many of us) did in days gone by.

It really was as easy as that.

Give it a go.


PS I could have avoided using the skip button entirely and still have ridden the route. To do this I woukd have changed each via point (each named town or village) into a shaping point. You can do this easily from within the device itself. Via points are points you have told the device you must go through, in other words the centres of places that are causing you such frustration. Shaping points are more harmless, so you can miss them out. Had the village at the T-junction been created as a shaping point, I could simply have ignored the instruction to turn right, turned left instead and continued quite normally. I might have received an off-route warning but as I have auto-recalculate set to off or prompted, I could have ignored it quite happily, too.

Get to know how your very powerful and very logical, expensive, GPS device works. That woukd be my advice. Oh, and have a paper map or at least be able to look at a map on a phone, as it helps no end when planning anything.

Click to expand...

Yep, that’s exactly what I already do, as I’ve mentioned above.

But handy for others that may not have been aware of that function directly on the device.

With the XT (I’ve not used a BMW branded nav for a few years, so not sure if they’ll do this, but probably will), when creating a route on the device itself, you can actually drag both the shaping points and via points, even drop additional pins in near to the route you want to take, via the zoom feature. I did it on a trip a few weeks ago to Devon, as I wanted to avoid Exeter (who, in their right mind wants to go to Exeter?) and the M5, just sticking to the nadgery back roads. It worked very well indeed.

Yes it’s more fiddly than using Basecamp, but if you’re sat in a bar one evening, or having breakfast and want to lob a quick route on, without using a laptop, it works rather well.

SBD said:

Thank you,

Yes, Non-urgent, relatively unimportant things that go “ping” when you don’t expect them to, and perhaps at a moment when your concentration is demanded by something more important AND urgent (like other road users, all of whom are potentially SMIDSY) are unwelcome and potentially hazardous. I suspect a “ping” in the dashboard of a car is much less distracting than through earphones in a helmet. And it doesn’t appear to have an independent volume control, or at least, I haven’t yet found one.

If I can’t find a means of limiting it I shall disable it, which would be a shame, as it would be helpful to know about major traffic issues ahead, if it can be advised in a manner that doesn’t distract from the key business of staying alive.

Suggestions welcome
Simon

Click to expand...

Just turn off the audible alerts, and just stick to the on screen alerts instead.

I don’t need no bitch in my ear telling me where to go, or alarm bells telling me I’m approaching a hazard. No siree.

Its doesn't just bleep for road works it also does so for everything it can think of i.e. if you have paid the additional fees for safety cameras. So having to monitor the screen on every bong becomes a bit of a chore sometimes,it would have been better had it voice prompts but it does not so thats what you get is a very basic piece of software with little options on what you can select (or not).

Excellent. Nutty can now use his Garmin device and plot routes in BaseCamp. I never thought the day would come. My life is now complete.

Wapping said:

Excellent. Nutty can now use his Garmin device and plot routes in BaseCamp. I never thought the day would come. My life is now complete.

Click to expand...

I’ve been doing it for years. Just kept it under my hat.