Navigation Route Selection

[dreichla]

My trip from NC to CT yesterday took us through the I95 corridor. As you can guess, the trip home was horrendous with miles of traffic jams along the way.

Trying to move westward and get out of the area and traffic jams, we tried the detour options. But the NAV system always seemed to try to get us back to I95. We tried selecting target destinations westward, but again, the system always tried to drag us back. Detours of the entire route kept using I 95. We even said, "screw it" and just got off an exit and started driving west. The system then just said "make a legal U turn. . ."

SO

Is there a way to tell the system - OK, I 95 is a road I don't want to go on at all? Creating the square exclusion zones don't work very well and is very limited. It would be nice if a rectangular zone could be created as well.

I hope I'm missing something embarrassingly simple here.

[Charles Suitt]

<_< Under those conditions, I would have cancelled the initially selected route completely. Gone Off the Interstate and re-entered the destination [Home?] and re-specified the route choices to NOT INCLUDE Freeways, Toll Roads and the like which should have routed you along state roads. I believe your solution would have been to tell your NAV system to *NOT* use the Freeways.

My NAV system, while it will "correct" if I go off the spedified route, it will try to go back to the original route specifications.

[jfschultz]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Charles Suitt @ Nov 27 2006, 02:57 PM) [snapback]354536[/snapback]</div>

<_< Under those conditions, I would have cancelled the initially selected route completely. Gone Off the Interstate and re-entered the destination [Home?] and re-specified the route choices to NOT INCLUDE Freeways, Toll Roads and the like which should have routed you along state roads. I believe your solution would have been to tell your NAV system to *NOT* use the Freeways.

My NAV system, while it will "correct" if I go off the spedified route, it will try to go back to the original route specifications.
[/b]

Actually, it would only be necessary to alter the route preferences to not include freeways. The navigation system will recompute the route after making the change. (Unless you have the navigation lockout defeated, you will need to get off the freeway and find a place to stop.)

[dreichla]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(jfschultz @ Nov 28 2006, 09:21 AM) [snapback]354759[/snapback]</div>

Actually, it would only be necessary to alter the route preferences to not include freeways. The navigation system will recompute the route after making the change. (Unless you have the navigation lockout defeated, you will need to get off the freeway and find a place to stop.)
[/b]

It was not that I didn't want freeways, but I didn't want a particular freeway. It would have been nice to say, "take me to the Garden State Parkway instead of I 95." Going west was counter intuitive to the nav system's logic of the quickest route. But since we knew how jammed up traffic would be between DC and New York, we figured a route further west, while distance wise would be further, would actually be faster. As it happened, our 6 hour trip turned into a 12 hour traffic nightmare.

Luckily, although quite late in the trip, we just happened to see signs for a route we wanted to take, and simply ignored the NAV's directions to drag us back into the snarly traffic jams.

[iwombat]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(dreichla @ Nov 29 2006, 12:36 PM) [snapback]355264[/snapback]</div>

It was not that I didn't want freeways, but I didn't want a particular freeway. It would have been nice to say, "take me to the Garden State Parkway instead of I 95." Going west was counter intuitive to the nav system's logic of the quickest route. But since we knew how jammed up traffic would be between DC and New York, we figured a route further west, while distance wise would be further, would actually be faster. As it happened, our 6 hour trip turned into a 12 hour traffic nightmare.

Luckily, although quite late in the trip, we just happened to see signs for a route we wanted to take, and simply ignored the NAV's directions to drag us back into the snarly traffic jams.
[/b]

The Prius routing algorithm leaves much to be desired. There is a "detour" function, that gives you the option of specifying how may miles you want to detour (1 mile, 5 miles, 10 miles?) but it does not allow you to specify a single road that you want to aviod. Navigation in my Nissan Murano would let me see a list of each road in the route and identify any from the list that I wanted to avoid. It would also let me re-route and specify a road or intersection that I want to include. On the Prius you have to use some clunky box on the map display to specify an area to avoid (not just a street) and you can't just do it temporarily just for the next trip you have to set it as a preference for all routing and later remove it.

To use the detour function to avoid a traffic jam on an upcoming road in the route, you are forced to enter the traffic jam first as you cannot "detour" from any road except the one you are currently on. What a piece of crap! Sometimes I can see the next freeway jammed from a mile away, but I can't tell it to detour. So I just detour manually by taking a different route. On the Nissan, the moment it saw I was taking another way it would re-route and almost always it would include the new road (cause generally that would be the most optimal route now that you are already on it). But on the Prius, it keeps telling me over and over, take the next exit over to that jammed freeway. Oops, missed it, try the next exit to the jammed freeway. And so on.

I also regularly have problems with the routes it picks. It will send me miles along streets with stop signs and lights when there is a freeway a block away that is a much faster route. It seems to pick the regular streets because the path including them is a few feet shorter even though it is littered with stop signs and lights and the speed limit is much lower. I don't have freeway preference turned off, and I do have the "speeds on different types of roads set", so I can't understand why it will not pick the freeway. This has happened enough times that I don't think it is just one missing on-ramp in the map database. It also frequently tells me to drive around several blocks in a circle rather than just telling me to take the next available U-turn. The Nissan navigation usually told me to take a U-turn and seemed to know when U-turns were marked illegal. I also believe it knew the specific speed limit of every road in the route and used that to optimize the route. On the Prius it lumps everything into three categories that you specify three static speeds for. Then it presumably lumps all roads into those categories to make the calculations simpler. Still, I cannot understand why it frequently ignores the obviously superior (multi-lane, faster speed limit) roads when routing.

I recall finally managing to tell it to use a particular road, but to do so I had to point at the road on the map. (Not easy since road names are frequently not displayed on my low-res systems. What I did not know was that not only would it remember the road, but it rememberd the exact point that I touched and doggedly kept trying to route me though that point, even when I was less than 1 mile from my destination and a trip through the 'point' to my destination was 17 miles long.

If you want to see route choices, it shows you multiple routes as colored squiggles on a zoomed out map. I cannot even tell what steets the colored squiggles represent as they are not named. I tried zooming in so I could see what street names correspond to the colored squiggles, but it would only let me scroll around. How can I choose beween routes when you can't even identify the streets. In the Nissan, it would not show me 3 routes, but the route it picked could be pre-viewed easily as either turn by turn street names or as a zommable, well-labeled, path on the map. Then you could make changes as required before agreeing. On the Prius I have no idea what I am agreeing to. Once you agree and actually move to the first street on the route I think there is some way to pull up the list of streets on the route, but sometimes it actually makes me take the freeway on-ramp before deciding I am "on the route" and by then access to the the turn list is disabled and I have to pull over and stop to see it.

On the route it tells how far till the next turn, but sometimes the display does not show the next turn street name either on the map or in the special next turn box. If you press the voice, it will tell you how far, but again not the name. The Nissan navigation had voice synthesis and would speak the name of the next turn. When and if you do finally reach your destination the Prius does not indicate whether it is on the left or right side of the road (the Nissan did). It also just gets in the vicinity and announces "you have arrived", then the navigation halts without displaying your endpoint address. I often cannot remember the street number that I programmed in half an hour earlier and I find myself looking around, not seeing the destination anywhere in sight and the stree number has disappeared from the navigator. I have to call it up again from the history to remember where I am going and then try to look for the address on the street. My Nissan always seemed to get me right to the doorstep and it would then display the endpoint address and continue routing you to it until you actually dismissed it.

Also the display on my 2005 Prius is crap. There is a newer display on the 2006 with more resolution, but it would have to get a heck of a lot better to match the display on the Nissan which displayed streets with thinkness, not as trails of single pixels. It also had a 3-D mode as if looking forward and down on the car from above. That mode was very nice. On the Prius if I zoom out far enough to see more than what I can see from looking out my car windows, the street names and details disappear. I used to be able to zoom out and examine the names of streets coming up very easily. Even when I am zoomed in all the way, the Prius often makes the unforgivable mistake of not displaying the names of the upcoming intersections on the map. I was never left wondering what some upcoming street is called on the Nisson map. It uses the cheapest imaginable font to display the street names. Seems silly that this would matter much, but when you are trying to glance quickly at something to read it, it makes a big difference. I haven't seen a nav system with fonts this crappy since Hertz neverlost version 0.5.

My list of gripes goes on and on. I used a MOPAR (Chrysler) navigation system in a Jeep for 4 years and then had a Nissan Murano with Nissans nav system for 4 years, so I have tried at least two other brands extensively. Both had smarter routing algorithms by a long shot. It appears to me that Prius wrote their own Nav software instead of buying it from someone, thus it has the intelligence of a Version 0.5 system.

I would love to hear that the newer display solves some of the font and street name visibility problems. However, I suspect that getting my old display upgraded will not be an easy or cheap thing to do, and unless the smarts got upgraded too, it would probably not be worth it in my opinion. I am about to buy an outboard unit because I can't trust this one anymore. It reads the satellite data, true enough, but for anything practical it seems useless IMHO.

[qbee42]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(iwombat @ Nov 30 2006, 03:19 PM) [snapback]355823[/snapback]</div>

It also just gets in the vicinity and announces "you have arrived", then the navigation halts without displaying your endpoint address.

I would love to hear that the newer display solves some of the font and street name visibility problems. [/b]

I can't argue with most of your complaints. The user interface and routing are not as good as those from the major GPS companies, such as Garmin.

To answer two of your questions relating to the 2006 and newer units, ours does tell you whether your destination is on the right or left...some of the time. Other times it just says "you have arrived." I haven't been able to find a pattern to when it can tell and when it can't. As for your last comment, the 2006 display is much better, with a good font for the road names and differing thicknesses and colors for various road types.

Overall I find it a nice NAV system, and very handy to have it integrated with the MFD, but I do wish they would improve the software. I'm sure the unit is capable, if only the software were up to the task.

Tom