Travel Technology - Garmin and Route numbers

As others have mentioned here, Garmin POIs/addresses aren't the greatest if the address contains a route or highway number instead of the name of the street. I know that in NJ both are assigned to some roads.

Many places I seem to need to go are on routes and I don't often know the name of the street - or worse - as it moves from town to town, the name changes (no, I'm not kidding).

I was coming back from the airport and the driver of the car had the same Garmin as me and I asked how he dealt with the route number issue.

He said it's not a problem - just don't put in the word "route" "rte" or "hwy" in the address - just the number, and it will work just fine.

For example: If I'm looking for 123 Route 456 I would just put in 123 456 and it should get me there.

Now, I haven't had the opportunity to test it, but he said that what he does and it works.

that seems to work for me. My address is particularly tricky due to some local address scheme idiosyncracies; mixed letters and numbers in a route/hwy.

There is only one spelling which works on mapquest and yahoo (they don't understand that Rt., Rte., R.R. and Route are the same word, nor do they understand that IL, ILL, and Illinois are the same; so of those 12 combinations, only one works). As I've mentioned before, Google can't handle it at all, and various GPS's have various issues with the address.

We're still in the Model T age of computer technology; the next 30 years will be interesting.

FWIW... Garmin does searches by "partial left and right". For instance:

Route 26
Rte 26A
RR 26B

will all be found by the keyword "26".

On a side note, my Garmin has a very peculiar way of pronouncing "Green Pines". :D

JP

On a similar note, has anyone else noted that the female voice sounds very disappointed every time she says "recalculating", like you forgot her birthday or something.:)

On a similar note, has anyone else noted that the female voice sounds very disappointed every time she says "recalculating", like you forgot her birthday or something.:)Mine is set to speak in Italian (much more charming that way), but Silvia also sounds somewhat disappointed, somewhat like a finger-wagging schoolmarm, when she says "ricalcola".

:D

I fairly exclusively search by POI instead of address, but have noticed that Garmin likes to use the names. I think that's because that is what it is technically called

I use Daniel the british voice and he just seems slightly disturbed when recalculating.

I had a huge problem this week in SLC trying to find my way to addresses in their system.

900 West 2300 South.

We gave up and called for directions.

I have that problem when navigating routes on a Garmin. Say you're driving on a route with a few turns. You come up to an intersection you've never been to before. You've been following route 100, and the GPS displays "Turn Right on Hickory Road", but all the route/turn signs show route numbers not names, and there's a Rt 20 and Rt 40 to the right, but you don't know which one is 'Hickory Road' until you pick one and drive a few hundred yards and it tells you you're off route.

It doesn't happen at every intersection, but it does happen enough that it' a problem. I see it happen a lot in the NJ suburbs and in Vermont and NH. In my case these are places I'm not familiar with and I rely on the GPS to navigate.

On a similar note, has anyone else noted that the female voice sounds very disappointed every time she says "recalculating", like you forgot her birthday or something.:)

That's why I call mine smarmy garmy. She always knows better than you.

Actually, my husband thinks she sounds like a female version of the robot on Lost in Space when she recalculates :)

He always repeats "recalculating, Will Robinson, recalculating" :D

When my father and I were in Ohio a few weeks ago, his StreetPilot constantly said that we should "turn bleft". I wondered out loud if the opposite was to "turn bright".

I use Daniel the british voice and he just seems slightly disturbed when recalculating.

Agreed. I just bought my mother a Nuvi 750, and "Daniel" seemed like I fried his cheese when I went off the route...but I didn't go off the route, as the Nuvi thought I could make a left as opposed to knowing about the jughandle at that particular intersection.

I'm always expecting mine to say "I'm sorry, you have exceeded your maximum route recalculations".

My nuvi 350 didn't have the car rental facility at Phoenix Sky Harbor as a POI. It didn't even have the correct street name where the building is located so typing the address was also not possible. I had to find a map of the airport with Google on my laptop, then manually place a point on the Garmin map.

Another time I was on a trip that was supposed to follow a single route number. But the nuvi got confused where the route number changed street names and sent me in the wrong direction with the annoying "recalculating" message as it tried to get me back to where I was supposed be.