Google Maps Traffic Avoidance Feature - experiences

[KneesUp]

The KneesUp family are off on us holidays in a few weeks, and not one of us likes traffic. I have an old-ish Garmin car Sat Nav with up-to-date maps, but it doesn't do traffic avoidance. We also have a tablet, which I could rescue from it's BBC iPlayer duties and use with google maps, which apparently help you avoid traffic jams.

Has anyone used it and found it works? My fear is that everyone using google to navigate will get diverted off the motorway and down the same B road, so instead of waiting 20 minutes in a queue on the M5 I'll end up taking a longer route and getting stuck in a 30 minute queue down some minor road.

Or is it smarter than that?

 

[mjr]

In my limited experience (most recently late June), Google maps seems to have a really poor idea of what are "traffic jams". Cars slowing for a bend or tight roundabout are often flagged as jams.

Also, if you're going down the M5, there are a few bottlenecks like the Avonmouth bridge which are pretty difficult to avoid because when they jam up, the alternative crossings like the A370 and A38 will also be jammed with people trying to avoid the M5.

 

[summerdays]

Sometimes I think it gets the level of heavy traffic wrong, but if it's Dark Red avoid at all costs, it will be crawling or stationary!

As for traffic transferring to the local roads, it does happen here, and locally you can tell on the A38 when the M5 is closed or log jammed! But there are often alternative alternative roads.

 

[Milkfloat]

Google, Waze, HERE, TomTom, Apple they all have Traffic data and all can be great or bad, the problem is you don't really know when it is telling you fibs. Waze seems to be consistently least worse in my experience.

* I work for one of the companies listed above, working with Traffic data. It is not Waze.

 

[LocalLad]

I like Waze. It tells you the traffic, which is pretty useful - I've managed to avoid a couple of howlers. It's also good that it alerts you to any speed cameras - use with a pinch of salt, but it's definitely a good feature.