Streets & Trips 2009 Routing Errors

I also have had bad experience with S&T St. Marys, Ontario to Nobel, Ontario. I reported this in S&T 2005 by phone, recently bought 2009 (free for now) and have similar errors. BTW DeLorme made different errors on the same trip. My Mio 520 gets it right, but doesn't have the fine controls over road desireability that I like. I don't like having to buy a new version just to get this kind of error corrected. Its a bug, fix it.

Hi Musty,

:welcome: to Laptop GPS World.

I plotted a route from St. Marys, Ontario to Nobel, Ontario. I see the same route between in version 2008 and 2009. The route seems OK. What seems to be the problem?

I just tried it in S&T 2007 which is the latest I have at the office (should update it this year).

It goes from St. Marys to Hwy. 402 near Strathroy, then 402 to the 401. Not good at all! I'm not sure that it is even following actual roads between St. marys and the 402.

Glenn

Sorry Marvin,

I never had s&t 2008, so 2007 is my previous experience. In 2009 I had trouble when I tried to avoid the greater Toronto area. I drew an avoid block with corners at about Ermosa, the Toronto lakefront and Dundas. The result is a route that takes me to Sarnia, then north along the lake to Red Bay, south to Mount Forest, then along a sensible route except I get to go to Orillia instead of taking the sensible 400 route (1day, 1hr. 13min.). This is all with default speeds, and the quickest route. If I add a place such as Creemore along the route both insanities go away (4hr, 13min).

If, instead, I go to preferred roads and move the slider for Interstates to one tick from the left end I get a different insanity including a drive to Hamilton and the sidetrip to Orillia (6hr. 30min.). Creemore fixes that trip too.

Bill

PS Creemore has some good lunch spots and a great brewery

Bill, could you provide sample addresses, or intersections? Routing from town to town generates what appears to me a sensible route, as shown on the picture above.

Glenn, going to Strathroy would indeed not make sense. That would be travelling the complete opposite direction for about 40 kilometers, or more. This might have been fixed since Streets & Trips 2007.

Just for the record, I'm using Microsoft MapPoint 2009 (and also Microsoft Streets & Trips 2008) at this moment. The trial 2009 version of S&T expired a couple of days ago on my mobile laptop. I could test it again on S&T 2009 later tonight when I get home, but I suspect I may get the same result.

I've had some fun playing with my St. Marys to Nobel trip and Avoid area. If I Avoid Kitchener where hwy 7 and 8 split up, I get the big west loop to Hwy 402 (wrong) as in S&T 2007, but go along 401 etc. OK after that. If I extend the Avoid area to block off the 401 at #8, I still start off going west (wrong) then take the 401 to the 403 correctly. If I then extend the Avoid area to take in the 403 at Hamilton I end up with the trip along Lake Huron (completely wrong) including a side trip to (nearly) Orillia.

We must have been typing at the same time, Bill. Does the route illustrated on the above screenshot seem right?

Marvin,

The route you show seems to be right if I want to go through Greater Toronto. The route goes wrong when I try to avoid the 401/403/407 roads near Toronto.

Technically the route is not going through GTA. Steeles Avenue is GTA's northern border. The route seems to go via HWY-407. Do you want to avoid Hwy-407?

You can see my problem if you can see the attachment.

Bill

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I see! Let me try avoid areas, too.

Marvin,

I really want to avoid 401 East of Kitchener, any 402, 403, 407, 410 and 401 south of Barrie, but a rectangle out around Kitchener down to Hamilton would do the trick I thought. Block all those options from the router. Another part of the strangeness is when I add a stop on the route where it gets its self sorted out, the rest of the route gets fixed.

Bill

Musty, I see the problem you are facing. No matter where you draw your avoid area rectangle(s), the routing seems bizarre, taking you on an unreasonably long detour.

jharpur, strange routing, but in your case at least the avoid area feature can fix it:

I just tried it in S&T 2008 and get the same results as you get in 2009.

I also tried it in Garmin's MapSource with City Navigator North America 2009. That's the same map data that's in Microsoft's S&T 2009. The routing is just as you would expect it to be (see attached screenshot), so we can rule out the possibility that it's an error in Navteq's map data.

Looks like it's a glitch of some sort in Microsoft's routing algorithm or Microsoft has introduce a map data error subsequent to receiving the data from Navteq.

...ken...

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