Zumo User Forums

Hello again,

I am at a loss to understand how to do something that was very simple with the old Zumo 390.

With the Zumo 390, when you find the road suddenly blocked by a local building site (they are frequent in England in the weekends; I have a 4 hours Kent tour that I could never complete without at least one road block, frequently 2 or 3), you just press the button "road block 1/2 mile away" (or the like), and the Zumo automatically recalculates the way to the next "yellow flag".

Yesterday I had the same issue and I found absolutely no way how to deal with it. Note: I had the setting that tells me automatically of traffic issue (I think I'll get rid of it, as I find it pretty useless when riding for leisure with the bike), but the Zumo XT was blissfully unaware of this road closure. No way to recalculate anything, and when I rode back it kept trying to get me to the point where the road was closed.

What am I doing wrong? There *must* be a way to do, with the most sophisticated XT, what worked so well with the simpler, honest 390.

Thanks
Omobono

Do you have the Garmin Drive app on your phone and the phone connected to the XT? AFAIK, that is how traffic info gets to the XT. Of course, if the traffic provider is unaware of the road closure then you are on your own. My experience with traffice notifications here in the U.S. has been terrible in that there have been many more false notices of closures than valid ones. I did three u-turns one day while trying to get across a stream that apparently had recently flooded and affected several bridges in the area. There wasn't an alert for any of those closures.

There is an option to set cutom avoidances.
Settings -> Navigation -> Custom Avoidances

You get the option to Add an area to avoid - you speicy a rectangle by specifying one corner and then the diagonally opposite corner.
The other option is to specify a road.

The other option is to avoid a particular road - you specify the first point on a road, then the second point on a road (any road). The satnav plots a route between them, and that is the section that the XT will avoid.

I haven't played with a great deal - I tried it in the car when I first got my 590, and decided that I couldn't be bothered with using that feature when on the road, and haven't touched it since - until just now.

I think traffic information comes through the 'aerial' as well as from a smartphone connected using the Drive App. The aerial is the power lead, and it will sometimes show up traffic delays as yellow orange or red lines on the road ahead. Although recently, my device has found it difficult to get hold of any traffic information. But I've been in Scotland for a couple of weeks, so maybe the hills, mountains and remote locations have a part ot play in that.

I've found traffic holdups and road closures not particularly useful. They can be out of date, and I have found that sometimes it suggests that an entire road is closed when only part of it is affected. In acouple of instances, I have been joining the affected road which the stanva reported as being closed. In fact the road was closed, but only in the oppositi direction to the way that I was heading.

Last week, the satnva wasn't reporting any road closures, but there was a 25 mile detour as a bridge was being replaced on the route that I was taking, and the road had been closed for a few weeks.

I have added a Howto describing how to get a route in Google Maps and check for road blocks.
viewtopic.php?t=1965

Thanks all and particularly to FrankB!

I have disconnected the app from the device (I think it was emptying the battery fast), so I think the satnav gets its traffic information "over the air". The traffic/roadblock function isn't useful to me as I am not interested in getting on a boring road in order to arrive 5 minutes earlier at my imaginary destination, which I will likely not even reach.

I will try the settings/navigation/custom avoidances that jfheath suggests; however, this seems cumbersome to do on the fly, when the old solution allowed an instant recalculation. Not for the first time, I have the impression that at Garmin some people love to make stuff complicated.

In the specific, this was one of those road blocks where noobody bothers to even give alternative deviation routes; it was just a small country road, all the locals know what the alternatives are, but I don't...

Seems you are getting on top of this very quickly.

I wasn't recommending the avoid facility as such. Just letting you know that it was there. As I said - I tried it once. It wasn't for me.

But all you need is a way that works for you - and that is all that matters.

The road block is a really weak point in Garmin. When you click on Detour, it gives you several options like JH mentioned. It can ask you for a number of miles to detour (1, 3, 5..). I used to use this option, but it's not perfect too as the "detour" can make you go in circles or even return you to the starting point again... I have not encountered many closed roads lately, but the last time I did, I was just looking at the map and took surrounding roads just guessing where that closed off road will be open again... When I got back on route (magenta line), Garmin continued to navigate.

I had a road closure experience this spring.
A mountain road in 1 direction was being resurfaced/replaced from a washout. XT kept wanting me to take a 100 mile detour and wouldn't acknowledge the marked detour. Needles to say, I followed the marked detour and when I got back on the planned route it continued to take me to my destination.
Coming back home the same route, it again wanted to route me another direction, even though the lane for this direction of travel was open.
It's definitely a toss up on the traffic updates.