traffic reporting is busted

For a good long time, I used GPS navigation with no traffic reporting whatsoever. Something like 13 or 14 years. It was in the late 2010s that I started using it due to a goof.

At that time, that older Garmins started getting cheap. What was hundreds of dollars when new could now be had for under $30, so I started collecting them. One of the used Garmin nuvis that I bought came with a GTM60 cable, which is a highfalutin charge cord with traffic antenna built-in. I got a chuckle when I saw it, because the cord was (and still is) actually worth significantly more than the screen itself. The seller simply didn't know how valuable that cord was.

After updating the nuvi, I got it all set up, plugged in the GTM60 in the car and took it out on the road.

It was lovely. Now I had traffic reporting, and it worked well.

However, when I really think about it, for the total amount of times traffic reporting with auto-recalculation of routes has saved my ass, it's been damned few.

I use a DriveSmart 76 that has more or less the same over-the-air FM traffic reporting the GTM60 had, along with the same auto-recalculation route feature. And what I can say now is this:

Traffic reporting isn't what it used to be. Not just for Garmins but also for nav apps on the phone too.

As automated as things are these days, traffic reporting is still very largely human-powered. Reports come in either from the government (as in from state or county employee reports, not federal), or from crowdsourcing.

From my understanding, automation of reporting only happens on the phone side of things, and only partially. If the network system for a particular app like Waze or Google Maps sees a bunch of active drivers all slowing in the same general area, the system guesses there must be slow traffic there and spit out an alert if you're headed that way. Or at least it's supposed to do that.

On the over-the-air FM side of things with a Garmin, that only works for an area with active coverage (mostly large metros), and is mainly limited to interstate roads. The biggest problem I've encountered is when the system reports phantom traffic, as in traffic that did exist a half-hour ago but has cleared. The problem there is that if the Garmin thinks traffic exists and auto-recalculation of route (which it calls "Optimize" in Traffic menu settings) is enabled, it will auto-recalculate around that phantom traffic and add time to the trip.

There are two saving graces to using a Garmin if the traffic reporting gets flaky. You can set it to ask first if you want to take a different route instead of auto-recalculate, or you can outright turn off traffic reporting altogether.

On the phone, and I'm talking about Waze in particular here, if that app decides to reroute you while driving, even if you were happy with the route given before and haven't missed any turns, well.. more often than not you just have to deal with it. And that's something you absolutely should not have to deal with while driving.

On a Garmin, you can set a prompt for rerouting, or outright disable the traffic reporting entirely and customize your route easily. And what that means is that at no point will the route be changed whatsoever while driving. The only time the route would change is if you missed a turn, in which the Garmin would have to recalculate the route to get you back on track.

If the traffic reporting is flaky (and it is) no matter which device you use, at least with the Garmin you can set it so the route won't change.

Is that a big deal? Yeah, it is.

Published 2025 Oct 2