Finally! Real-time traffic info for NZ GPS owners

Suddenly there’s a reason to buy a sat-nav system for your car, with AA Traffic set to debut next week.

When I last reviewed a GPS system, I related how I took the family on a Saturday drive. First, we hit the Auckland Harbour Bridge, where road works had slowed traffic to a standstill. I figured we’d take the scenic route home, over the Greenhithe Bridge to avoid the congestion - only to encounter even worse traffic around the Whenuapai Air Show.

Real-time traffic updates would have saved me a lot of grief that day. They constitute a killer reason to by a GPS system even if you spend 95% of your driving time in familiar territory.

Overseas, it’s been a common feature for years. Now, at last, we’re getting real-time updates, too.

Navman, and beyond
After years of development, AA Traffic, developed by AA subsidiary GeoSmart, will debut in new Navman product next week (it will be standard in the new Navman My500XT, and an option in two step-down models; a one off Traffic licence fee will be hidden in the 500XT’s price).

That’s just the start, however. GeoSmart will be looking to offer AA Traffic through all the partners who employ its maps and other services. These include Navman’s arch-rival TomTom (the pair are neck-and-neck in the NZ market); most other retail GPS brands bar Garmin; BMW, Honda and Ford. All told, GeoSmart’s data feeds around 90% of the GPS hardware brands at the consumer end of the market (and about 85% of fleet management and telematics systems).

But Navman does get the kudos of being first cab off the rank; a timely fillip after the once-Kiwi company’s latest round of redundancies, which kick in today.

Updates every 5 minutes, via coded FM
Traffic updates will be collated by Geosmart from sources including the Police, AA call centre staff, Transit New Zealand and 12 local councils (who can flag events - like air shows!). In future, more local authorities will be added, plus crowd-sourcing, traffic light counters and Transit's new motorway occupancy sensors (apparently not up and running yet).

And the AA Traffic system will deliver said updates for main roads and feeder roads every five minutes.

Flight info for Auckland and Wellington airports, and Cook Straight ferries, is also included (with more airports on the way), so you know if you have to hurry, or not, while driving to the terminal.

And because of its lock on the telematics market, GeoSmart can also pull traffic flow (though not yet traffic speed) data from its fleet management customers, which is in turn added to the AA Traffic mix.

Updates will be delivered to the Navman My500XT via an encrypted FM transmission (in Auckland, via a transmitter on the Sky tower). In the step-down MySeries models, an FM receiver can be added as an optional extra, and takes the form of a cradle add-on.

TomTom says none of its current range is compatible with AA Traffic. But Look for AA Traffic support to become standard in all future models. (The AA is using RDS or radio data system technology, by the way; which you may already be familiar with if you've got got a digital radio - some stations use it to broadcast data such as the artist and title of a track currently playing. DAB support will be added in the future).

Recalibrate your route
Once your Navman My500XT has warned you about slow traffic flow, a traffic accident or roadworks, you can choose to let it automatically recalibrate a route.

To avoid being hit by information overload, you can also fine tune whether you want to receive updates only on your route; near-by; or further afield.

GeoSmart sales and marketing manager Luigi Cappel says AA Traffic will create a whole new generation of GPS drivers. If it works as advertised, he’s right.

Free on the web
Incidentally, you won’t have to by a new GPS system for your car to see AA Traffic updates. Geosmart is also feeding the data to the society’s AA Roadwatch site (above), where you can click the new Traffic tab to see updates for your town or city.

The recently expanded AA Maps site also boasts a new Traffic tab.