Hugo’s blog

The change of Daylight Saving Time in the US actually had positive aspects: when our GPS showed the wrong time, I started looking up for a firmware update, and discovered that it had a somewhat ancient firmware. I got this geek feeling of excitement that you feel that you are going to upgrade the software on a device to the latest version. Come on, you know the feeling.

I noticed in the changelog the following:

• Improved Traffic Interface

Until now, I had been pretty disappointed by the traffic interface: basically, at some point while driving, it would say “Caution, traffic ahead”, and display an icon. At this point, you might already be stuck in traffic and unhappy. Clicking on the traffic icon, you could ask it to avoid the traffic problem in question, with no idea of how much a problem it was and whether it really was a good idea to do so. Basically, it was useless, and frustrating.

Version 5 changes all that. It evaluates the delay that the traffic has on your itinerary, and takes this into account to choose the best route. It then displays, in the traffic icon, the number of minutes that you’ll waste because of traffic. And you don’t need to ask it to avoid anything, as it has already taken it into account. Basically, it’s traffic in a GPS system the way you’d like it to work.

So the question was: how efficient is it? Well, I did a real life test last night. Between Sunnyvale and downtown San Francisco, at 6pm, took me 50 minutes without ever hitting any traffic. Though you can argue that Mondays are usually not as bad as other weekdays, I was impressed by the route it made me take, and by the result.

The bottom line is that I’m now very happy with the traffic system. Kudos to Garmin.