Thread: Garmin CityNavigator Australian Map Accuracy .vs. Street-directory .com. au

It has been a source of regular annoyance and sometimes considerable inconvenience to me that the Garmin City Nav maps have a high level of blatant errors in them (relative to zero which is what you expect). Not new roads etc, although why it is commonplace for new roads / changes not to show up for many years is another question. In 5 years use the blatant faults I have seen would be around the 30 - 40 mark.

The puzzle to me is that good info is available. Whenever I check the error on the Garmin product against [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] I find almost without exception that the latter has the correct info. I have tried over the years to get Garmin interested in changing their base product but the short story is they say they are in a long term contract with Sensis they can't get out of and they thought they were buying the best product available at the time.

Just to add some substance to the above comments, attached is an example where there is a discontinuity in a major road, and another where there is no junction to a major road on a side street. These are not isolated examples, I have sent them both in (and many others) to Garmin so expect to see a fix eventually. On a holiday in February this year with version 2010.20 the map with the discontinuity really was irksome. When in Hobart instead of finding our way easily back to our accommodation on the east side of the Derwent river it wouldn't accept that the on ramp to the Tasman Hwy bridge actually went over the bridge, it is fine coming the other way. So, instead of the 3km actual trip it wanted to send us round via a further north bridge that was 25km round.

When planning routes a separate but related major problem is that the categorisation of road type is abysmal - particularly relevant to sort out sealed / unsealed for motorcycling purposes. It is a lot better in street-directory but not perfect so I tend to have both products open and set the route in Mapsource and check / confirm against the other, with Google Maps then street view being a really useful method to compare what the state of the roads are - a year ago anyway when Google "did" Oz!

I doubt there is much can be done about this, but there may be some useful info for people here anyway until (if ever) Sensis get their act together. Did you know, by the way, to get rid of all those annoying logos you can go to the C:\Program Files (x86)\Garmin\ directory and rename the offending files to the following: Sensis.old.bmp, Whereis_PMS.old.bmp, and UBD.old.bmp

Streuth, can't post links or pics without 5 posts, so will need to put up dummy posts to deal with this restriction against bad behaviour by others, or whatever the purpose is. Not that I am complaining as I really like and respect a lot of the stuff going on in this forum.