Re: BBC Click v. London Cabbie!


On Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:31:12 +0000, JNugent
<not.telling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Mike wrote:
On Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:42:19 -0800 (PST), PeoplesPresident@xxxxxxxxx
wrote:

Every SatNav that I've tested by asking for a route to Foulness Island
goes wrong and dumps me in Burnham on Crouch. I guess it because they
try to find a route that uses main roads to get as close as possible
to the destination then fails to back up sufficiently to find the
bridge...


Not satnav as such but Autoroute 2002 easily finds a route from
Manchester to Foulness Island.

Maybe Microsoft haven't screwed it up as much as we usually think they
do although the earlier version (maybe 2000?) had some big problems
with the M1 going past Leeds and something near Stansted Airport. At
one or two zoom levels the roads disappeared completely.

Why bother with Autoroute (unless you operate it on a laptop in the car)?

Surely free-standing routing apps have been blown out of the water by
Google Maps, which never needs updating by the user?

I still use it, despite it being hopelessly out of date on some roads
because it's paid for and *doesn't* rely on a connection to the net,
area avoids are easily set and changed to force particular routing.
Zooming and printing specific portions of maps is much easier.
Printing an overview map and list of directions that you get with most
online planners is just about useless, as are strip maps for every bit
of the journey, as are ridiculous printed directions such as turn left
onto x heading towards y - where y is always some obscure place no one
except a Highways Agency road geek has ever heard of.


Going off at a tangent for now, radio traffic reports fall into this
trick, naming junctions by some ridiculous convention. There was one I
head the other week that just proved how ridiculous this practice has
got.

"Congestion M62 at the 'Newmarket' exit"

If they had said Oulton, or Rothwell, or Stanley, or Wakefield or even
junction 30 then everyone on the planet who even remotely knew the
area would know exactly where they meant. If they had said one
junction east of the M1/M62 interchange then even a southerner might
have had a clue.

Most people would think that for most practical purposes, Newmarket is
in Suffolk, although there are other places by that name in the UK
they can effectively be disregarded in route planning, it certainly
isn't anywhere remotely near the M62, its closest point of approach
being 114 miles as the crow flies.

Meanwhile "Newmarket Lane" commonly known by one tramp and his dog as
the B6135 is a infinitesimally small road close to junction 30 on the
M62, it exists on the 1:25000 OS map but no place name called
Newmarket is anywhere near. Maybe it was buried under the central
reservation.

Anyway back to autoroute. With autoroute I can print the end
destination to street level - say 400m radius, have another map out to
a couple of mile radius still bearing lots of road names and then I
occasionally print ones for a major junctions/changes of direction I'm
not familiar with. For most journeys 3 or 4 sides of paper gets me
right to the door, with a final *** being the route timing so I can
get a reasonable idea if I'm late (not that it usually matters)

I use online maps too, just not for route planning because they are in
my experience truly dire. Recently one suggested Nottingham to
Cambridge via the M1, M25 and M11 175 miles in 2.5 hours - whereas
going slightly cross country but much more of a straight line via the
A52 and A1 its just 90 miles albeit taking 2.25 hours.


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