traffic reporting is starting to suck

Late last year, I said I stopped using traffic reporting. Changed my mind on that. And now I'm about to change my mind again.

Took a drive into a large city recently. My Garmin is directing me as usual, it gets a traffic report and automatically reroutes to get around it. I go where it says to go, and I realize that yeah, this isn't exactly a good route. A few turns later, I did get back on track and got to the destination.

I didn't start using traffic reporting with automatic rerouting until the late 2010's. Sometimes it has saved my bacon, sometimes it sorta/kinda works, and other times the rerouting is just straight up goofy. It's a crapshoot every time. Does the traffic reporting and rerouting get any better if a phone app is used instead? No, and I'll explain why in a minute.

For that most recent trip I took, this was one of those sorta/kinda worked moments. It technically did get me around the traffic, but the alternate route was a little goofy. Not big time goofy. Just a little.

Something that all traffic-capable Garmin DriveSmart models have is the "Optimize Route" option. If set to "Automatic", that means the navigator will automatically reroute you whenever it knows about significant traffic delays on the current route. If set to "On Request", then it means the navigator will alert you that upcoming traffic is ahead on the current route, but not reroute unless you specifically give the go-ahead to do so.

I went ahead and set mine to "On Request", because I do want to know of upcoming traffic, but I'll make the decision of whether the navigator should give me an alternate route or not.

There's a big reason traffic reporting and auto-rerouting on the phone isn't any better than a Garmin DriveSmart. A couple of reasons, actually. First is that "I'm going to reroute you whether you want it or not" approach that map apps have, with no way to turn that off. Not cool. Second, most (all?) map apps have no way to define custom no-go zones, whereas you can on a Garmin DriveSmart, along with enabling/disabling them at whim.

I've also found custom no-go zones (technical name: Custom Avoidances) really nice for avoiding things like specific alleyways in parts of suburbia. An alley obviously doesn't have a street name, so it's not like you can set that kind of specific avoidance by text input. But it's not a problem on the Garmin. Just draw a box.

For now, I've made the switch to "On Request" for traffic reporting. I'm still on the fence concerning whether I should just disable all traffic reporting (again) outright. If this way of traffic reporting is less goofy, I'll stick with it. But if the goof level doesn't change, traffic reporting gets turned off.

Either way, it's nice to have the option of whether I want it or not.

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