New Irish roads and bypasses won't be on Sat navs until 2010
Monday August 04 2008
MOTORISTS will not be able to find many of Ireland's multi-million euro new roads on sat-nav for a year and a half because of shortcomings in the system.
Bypasses and other new routes opened in 2008 will be invisible on in-car GPS until as late as 2010 because of a lack of links between local authorities and mapping service providers.
It is one of a series of problems holding back the field of satellite navigation in Ireland. As well as facing outdated maps, motorists are driving unwittingly into snarl-ups because real-time traffic information for GPS sets does not exist.
GPS Ireland's Gary Delaney said Ireland needed more "joined up thinking" if it is to stop slipping even further behind the rest of Europe on the issue.
He said drivers' most common complaint was that their sat-navs sent them the wrong-way down one way streets. But, he said, the problem is much broader than that.
"If a county council changes the alignment of a road, the people who make the mapping might not know about it for quite some time", he explained.
"New roads won't appear on sat navs for 18 months".
Ireland's lack of postcodes is also contributing to the problem of finding addresses by GPS.
In response, GPS Ireland has introduced its own postcoding system.
Meanwhile, Irish motorists are unable to avail of a system that lets European drivers get real-time traffic and travel information on their GPS sets. In many other countries, up-to-date information is relayed to the devices by radio on a special Traffic Message Channel.
But this does not exist in Ireland and motorists follow their sat-navs blindly into jams that are routinely avoided by their European counterparts.
Sat-nav company TomTom has said: "Quite simply, the service doesn't work in Ireland because it isn't supported by any of the radio stations or provided by any Government departments".
TMCs work by delivering real-time traffic and travel information sent by police, traffic cameras, the AA and other sources, through FM radio signals.
Traffic incidents are sent out as messages containing an event code, time code and location, all of which are translated into the user's language by a receiver.
In other countries, the Government usually has a role in providing the service.
Each Government is allotted a set of codes and they have the rights on these to use them themselves to provide the service, or allow a private company to use them.
When the new Dublin Transport Authority is established, it will have powers to deliver a real-time travel and traffic information service.
- - Andrew Phelan
