Minok

This morning was another one of those "what friggen data are THEY looking at!" moments as I came to a crawl at 20mph for 10 minutes on I-90 westbound (going left) between Issaquah and Bellevue as XM Navtraffic displayed a clear and all green interstate all the way to Lake Washington. FRACK!

Once I got to the office, I pulled up the Washington DOT website of traffic data, which is real time (and from which navteq should be pulling its data) to see that WSDOT had the accurate picture painted there.

So what is XM Navtraffic/Navteq's excuse? What does it take for them to get this rather simple service correct? ARGH.

Edgy01

thanks for sharing. In Europe, they have had this real-time traffic advisory service working for decades. It works great, always current, and DOESN'T COST A THING.

stevepow

XM can be spotty - and ambiguous, but it has saved my buty from a giant mess of traffic more than a few times. Short of moving to Europe, I reckon that's it. Did you send this information to XM?

Minok

Yeah, I'm familiar with the great RDS solution that has been deployed in Germany since the late 1970's I think. Lived there for nearly 20 years. Of course their road network has clearly signaged alternate routes in place so that those FM radio traffic announcements are actually 1) meaningful to a driver not familiar with the area and 2) actionable by the same driver. (if you drove in Germany, thats what all of those rectangular (blue?) U-<digit> road signs are about; they are alternate routes that can be recommended to get around sections of autobahn so if there is a snafu, all the traffic announcement has to say is "blockage at mile A6, mile marker xyz, recommend you take U-x to get around the issue" )

XMNavTraffic is the best we can do in the US due to the way the FM radio network operates here.

I've sent the message to XM and have gotten the 'a representative will contact you' reply.. but have yet to be contacted. My past experiences are that XM has DELL level tech support answering their email, so I'll get a dumb-boilerplate response that can be read out of a manual or pamphlet rather than an actual bug ticket or investigation of the problem happening.

The last time I had problems was at the end of my trial subscription, where there was no navtraffic data available in the mornings, but it would come back mid day. All I got out of XM support was them starting off with: "We see your service has lapsed....". As if answering the question about why might their service have been down on a morning 2 weeks ago when I had service in place, is somehow affected by my not having service right now.

Heck, if XM and/or Navteq had an responsive feedback mechanism, I'd not even post the issue here, but its been the case that the only way to get motion on these sorts of issues is to make sure the issue is broadly visible so that the companies with a stake in customer satisfaction are wanting to engage to fix the issue.

For me its an issue because that stretch of I-90 is the only interstate I drive in my daily commute and so as far as the entire navtraffic solution is concerned its the only bit of the planet I care about. If those 5 miles are interstate are not reported correctly and timely, the system has almost zero value for me.