TomTom Routes' live view of Auckland traffic at 8.30am this morning. Your correspondent was miffed that road works and an associated snarl up around Mt Eden village didn't qualify for an alert.New Zealand has become the first Asia-Pacific country to get T
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TomTom Routes' live view of Auckland traffic at 8.30am this morning. Your correspondent was miffed that road works and an associated snarl up around Mt Eden village didn't qualify for an alert.
New Zealand has become the first Asia-Pacific country to get TomTom's real-time traffic update service, dubbed HD Traffic.
Two new TomToms - the GoLIVE 1000 ($549) and the GoLIVE 1050 World ($799) - receive an HD Traffic via a GPRS cellular link (both have Vodafone SIM cards). A subscription is free for the first year (as opposed to free for life with Navman's equivalent service; TomTom has yet to reveal what subscription fee it will charge once the free year expires).
But you can also access the real-time traffic incident updates free via a free website, routes.tomtom.com (useful if, say, you have an iPhone or other web-capable big screen phone with you in your car; TomTom also has an official iPhone app, incidentally, which includes frills like spoken street names and multi-lane view, for $94.99).
(Another free alternative for real-time traffic updates via the web is the AA's Roadwatch site.)
TomTom draws its real-time traffic data from the AA's Geosmart division, which taps a range of local authorities for accident and incident data.
Navman also takes its traffic feed from Geosmart (at least for its high-end models).
But TomTom claims to have the edge in two areas. It says its updates are pushed to in-car GPS systems every two minutes - a greater frequency than Navman. And it adds real-time traffic flow data, drawn from a third-party that monitors trucks, vans and other commercial vehicles using GPS.
