Decide your own route?

I'm looking for a Sat-Nav system that would, when required, allow me to
program my own route, by means of setting waypoints by clicking on
specific junctions on a map on some desktop PC based software, and then
transferring that route across to the portable sat-nav system.

Basically there are often cases, particularly in places like London,
where it's easier to plan out a route first that might not be the
obvious route that a sat-nav would produce, but would involve much less
queuing.

Or maybe cases where the sat-nav simply gets it way out - as an example
I punched into google maps a couple of postcodes of a route a friend's
soon to be doing - from East London to Woking - and it directed me
around the South Circular, when by far the best way would be into
Central London (out of con-charge hours), and cutting through
Battersea/Wandsworth and out to the A3. Now I don't know that a Sat-nav
system would give the same route, but it's just an example of where such
a feature would be a great help.

I've heard that some Garmin products can do this, but try as I might, I
can't find any detailed info on this particular feature on their
website.

What product, if any, has this feature?

--
"For want of the price of tea and a slice, the old man died."

I'd like one that has similar, but for your needs (London driving),
have you thought about Trafficmaster's main system? It calculates
routes on a central computer rather than your in-car unit, taking
traffic, road updates accidents etc into account and sends directions
to the car and updates where necessary. You press a button and get
connected to an operator who you give your destination to, then the
details get sent to the in-car unit.

I've not tried it, it sounds pretty good especially for technophones
or those for whom traffic is particularly troublesome. It's expensive
though, but might be worth a punt.

--
Blast off and strike the evil Bydo empire!

I know the one you mean (SmartNav), but I'm not convinced that the
traffic monitoring is done as well in cities as it is on major trunk
roads and motorways. Add to that the fact that it'd probably need a
reasonable delay from the obvious route for it to divert you, and there
are plenty of points around London where a bit of a delay is par for the
course, but there's almost certainly a much better route, quite often
one that involves diverting off the main road in quite a way back before
the centre - one example would be going coming from the West to
somewhere on the Strand, or anywhere East of Trafalgar Square. I'd
imagine most sat-nav systems (including SmartNav) would direct me
through Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, and just accept that a
delay would be inevitable, but I'd come off the A4 earlier and cut
through Belgravia/Victoria/Lambeth and cross the river on either
Waterloo or Blackfriars Bridge - virtually no extra distance, and can
cut journey times substantially. I'm not convinced that any product on
the market could do something like that automatically as they all stick
to recommended routes, with small diversions en route if there's a big
delay, but by then it's probably too late to find a decent alternative
route.

That's the sort of thing I'm after, and such software would be ideal to
enable another driver unfamiliar with an area to benefit from my
knowledge of a particular area.

--
"For want of the price of tea and a slice, the old man died."

Ah right, I was about to say, it doesn't sound like you need a satnav!

If you find such a product, do let me know, I'd quite like to know
myself. None of the ones I've seen allow you to add your own routes,
or indeed pretty much anything to the map, something like memory map
allows lots of routes to be added but they're only lines on a moving
map, no routing capability.

One option that might be worth considering is using the "Itinerary"
function of TomTom navigator, the itinerary files can be transferred
from one device to another. You could programme in certain routes
avoiding blackspots and distribute them, however TomTom won't
automatically use your routes, the driver would have to specifically
select the route. Not ideal at all but could be useful to teach them.

I'd love to see the ability to put in "avoid areas", being able to
place blocks or time penalties on particular areas that are taken into
account by the routing algorithms. At the moment all I can do is
select "avoid part of route" and click on a ludicrously high-level
route element, e.g. "M25" in which case it avoids the whole M25, or
"Bristol" in which case it avoids a circle around the centre. Not
impressive really.

--
Blast off and strike the evil Bydo empire!

to

Well, for a lot of areas that I would be familiar with I wouldn't need
it, but for some places where I just know that a particular stretch of
road leading up to a particular junction is nearly always a nightmare,
and worth avoiding, but might not neccessarily know the surrounding area
all that well, such a system would come into its own - I could spend a
couple of minutes taking educated guesses at roads that are likely to
not give too much trouble (i.e. not approaching busy major roads etc)
and then let the system guide me. Much the same as drawing a route on a
map with a pencil and asking a passenger to say left, right, etc.


No - there's a hell of a lot more that could be done. OS Mastermap has
got some fantastic features (was looking at a technical demo of it the
other day, and the detail it goes into is very impressive - one way
sections of streets, specific times of bus lane operation, etc), so if
someone could create something genuinely brilliant based on their up to
date data, it would be world-beating, IMHO. It'd also need someone to
do a *very* detailed survey of average speeds of sections of road at
various times of day - it'd be one hell of a lot of data to do it
properly, but the end product would be superb.

--
"For want of the price of tea and a slice, the old man died."