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Nifty Ways to Use Your GPS System on Road Trips
It wasn’t too long ago that your family would take the traditional road trip and your dad would be attempting to drive while peering over a large map. He was lost, had too much pride to stop and ask for directions, and your holiday was hampered as a result.
Today, road trips have been forever changed by GPS navigation systems. These slick computer systems can get you from point A to point B, offering the quickest directions. Have a detour? No problem. Your GPS will automatically create a new route…and family road trips can be fun again.
While you’re probably familiar with punching in the address to where you want to go on your GPS, there are a bevy of new features that are being released on many of the new GPS systems today, allowing users to truly get the most out of their GPS navigation system.
Set Your Home
Most GPS systems have a “Take Me Home” feature, which allows the user to simply click home and receive directions back to their home address. The only problem is, most of the time this feature is hidden. You’re never asked for your home address right in the beginning.
Search your instruction manual and figure out how to input your home address. The next time you’re in an unfamiliar place and need to get home, you’re only one button away.
NOTE: If your car is ever stolen, you don’t want to give the car thief directions to your front door. Therefore, instead of programming your exact address as “home,” just program the address of a landmark in your neighborhood.
Need Gas? Food? A Hotel?
Before GPS systems became more sophisticated, you either called information for the closest gas station or asked around. Today, GPS systems are a one-stop shop.
Use the “Point of Interests” feature on your GPS to find the closest gas station, hotel or restaurant. Some of the better GPS systems will give you the actual name of the restaurant in their directory and include the phone number so you can call and make a reservation if need be…and there are even a couple of systems that will show you reviews so you can see which restaurants are worth going to and which aren’t.
And if you’re ever low on petrol, this feature will also point you to the closest service station.
Avoid Heavy Traffic
Did you know that most new GPS systems actually offer live traffic updates? There’s no more wondering how backed up the highway is or if the turnpike construction is completed.
Live traffic updates allow you to avoid those busy areas and save a significant amount of time. Of course, theres’s a catch: these systems are usually only available in major metropolitan areas, and many of them carry a monthly service fee.
Still, if the prospect of getting stuck in traffic gets your blood boiling, a monthly service fee is a small price to pay.
Author Taylor Ritchie feels lost without a good navigation system. Taylor relies on NRMA gps sat nav for directions and other nifty features such as avoiding heavy traffic.
The World’s Worst Car?
The Book of Heroic Failures (a very popular and funny collection of spectacular failures and epic fails) quite naturally has an entry for the worst car ever. The (dis)honours in that book go to the Ford Edsel. And the Ford Edsel is certainly a bit of a dog. It was a gas-guzzler that came out just as a recession was hitting. The design of the front end was downright peculiar and the car itself wasn’t overly reliable. And then there was the name – naming a vehicle after the offspring of the company founder might have worked for Mercedes Benz (Mercedes was the name of Daimler’s daughter) but didn’t work when they tried naming this one after Edsel, son of Henry Ford Junior.
However, Ford Edsels are still knocking around and are considered classic collector’s items. After all, the cars were slightly notorious. However, they are still around to be collected. The same cannot be said for another contender for the title of Worst Car Ever, the Ford Pinto.
It is something of a tribute to all the other Ford cars that the company survived both of these spectacular failures. Having produced two such dogs (or lemons) would have ruined a lesser company.
But the Pinto! Regular readers of this blog will have noticed the Pinto turning up in the list of the (possibly) ugliest cars and the cars with the silliest names. The ugliness of the Pinto is, of course, debateable, and some people might like that rather interesting and slightly pointy back end. And an awful lot of people don’t. And the name is also unfortunate. My guess is that the designers of the Pinto were thinking of the horses, keeping this car in line with the Mustang. Horse-lovers, of course, know that “pinto” is the American name for a piebald or skewbald horse (black and white or brown and white for those who aren’t horsey) and they were really popular with Native Americans, so you’ve got a bit of a Wild West touch. However, because the name derives from the Spanish word for “paint” (because the horses look like they’ve had large blobs of white paint chucked at them), it’s also the name of a type of bean that also has a two-tone colour job. And it’s the Spanish for “pint”. In Portuguese, however, it means something different again – it’s the word for a willy, and I don’t mean the company that first came out with Jeeps.
But a bad name and debateable looks aren’t the utter kiss of death for a car. Ugliness is debateable and a car with a bad name can be perfectly reliable and efficient. But being dangerous is unforgiveable. And this is why the Ford Pinto really should have the title of Worst Car Ever. The Ford Edsel’s mechanical foibles pale by comparison beside what the Pinto could do.
It’s all in that sloping back end. You see, the design of the back end meant that if the Pinto was rear-ended – possibly one of the most common types of accident – the fuel tank would be shoved forwards and bits of it would break off, meaning that it was more likely to burst into flames in an accident. The sloping back end meant that the fuel tank didn’t have an awful lot of protection at the rear – not much of a bumper and absolutely no crumple zones. This is one reason why you don’t see too many Ford Pintos as collectors’ items: a lot of them exploded and ended up on the scrap heap.
The true ugliness of the Ford Pinto was revealed when a corporate document about this car was leaked to the public. You see, the heads of Ford at that time had become aware that this design flaw turned the Pinto into a death trap. And then they did a nasty piece of accounting where they weighed up the costs of recalling and repairing the vehicles versus the cost of paying compensation when drivers and passengers were burned alive – and found that compensation was cheaper so they decided to go with that (A copy of the original exposee is available here). A recall was forced on them eventually and the company was hauled into court with one heck of a lawsuit that the infamous cost–benefit analysis hadn’t quite factored in (full details on this website).
Ford survived and Ford has cleaned up its reputation since then. The Model T, the Anglia, the Mustang, the Thunderbird, the Escort and others remained popular. And Ford Europe and Ford Australia didn’t go near the Pinto. So Ford everywhere survived.
In many ways, the Ford Fiesta took the place of the Pinto shortly after a major lawsuit, becoming the compact economy model that had been the original aim behind the Pinto. Modern Fiestas got 5 stars out of 5 in the ANCAP safety tests.
World's Worst Traffic Jams
By far the most frustrating driving experience is being gridlocked in a traffic jam. But once you read about the worst jams in the world you’ll be much more composed- if not thankful, when you get delayed by a few minutes in your next traffic hold up.
The worst traffic jam in Australia is probably seven hours. This occurred in April 2010 on the F3 Freeway (Pacific Highway) heading north out of Sydney, when two trucks collided and stranded commuters from 4pm until 11pm when it was finally cleared.
Whilst this one incident created enormous controversy, it pales into insignificance when compared to poor Zang Wei’s experience when travelling from Inner Mongolia into Beijing a couple of months later, where he, and a few thousand others, were held up for an unbelievable TEN DAYS!
So, here’s the ranking for the FIVE world’s worst traffic jams.
1. Beijing-Zhangjiakou Highway August 2010
Whimsically, a set of roadworks intended to alleviate congestion was blamed for the world’s worst traffic jam that lasted a staggering ten days. At its worst, with the jam stretching back 100kms., trucks joining the end of the queue were travelling at 3kp/d (that’s kilometers per day!!) attempting to reach their Beijing destination. Communist China also spawned the entrepreneurial spirit with roadside sellers sprouting up, selling food and drink at exorbitant prices. Local newspapers also reported many incidents of highway robbery, violence and even divorces (“don’t you believe that I am ten days late getting home- been stuck in traffic, dear?”)
2. Paris-Lyon Autoroute 1980
In 1980, at the height of the winter skiing season, everyone wanted to return to Paris at the same time. According to the Guinness Book of Records this jam tailed back on the Lyon-Paris autoroute some 110 kms. and consisted of around 18 million cars. It was reported that a normally 4 hour journey took up to 20 hours, with many, many cars abandoned by the roadside, bereft of fuel, still awaiting collection several days later. It was not reported as to how the owners got home, though they could have skied home more quickly. By distance it stretches further back than any other recorded jam.
3.Sao Paulo – June 2009
According to Time Magazine Sao Paulo in Brazil has the worst day-to-day traffic jams in the world, but June 10th 2009 surpassed anything they had suffered before with 300kms. of accumulated queues amassed around the gridlocked city. It was very quiet indeed in all the city offices as more than half the commuters never made it to work, going home in disgust. Yet you have to wonder what it would have been like if they hadn’t already instituted a last digit numbering system for peak hour weekday traffic! Whilst it was sorted out within 12 hours it still ranks as an all time high for the number of kms. gridlocked.
4. Houston, Texas- September 2005
The early warning system for Hurricane Rita prompted 2.5 million people to flee Houston, but they didn’t get very far very quickly, all travelling down- or not travelling down Interstate 45. Two days later many were still stranded in the melee. Some made a social occasion out of it-well, there was nothing else to do, chatting, having community BBQ’s, helping stalled cars and trucks out of the way and generally making the best out of it.It seems the impending hurricane took pity on these poor stranded motorists and avoided plonking the eye of the storm in the middle of the congested highway.
5. Patna, India- December 2009
India is not renowned for its traffic interface, and jams are just part of the experience. But the worst one noted was in Patna, a city of nearly six million people, nestled on the southern banks of the Ganges. It is a political centre and a whole number of political activists decided to protest on the same day- the first day of the month in December 2009. Not a good idea….it resulted in what was certainly the world’s most varied traffic jam, embracing gridlocked cars, trucks, tuk tuks, bicycles, scooters, horses and carts and even prams into the equation. The outcome was that hundreds of thousands of mobile Patna residents went nowhere whatsoever throughout the day- and their protests weren’t heard above the hooting horns!
Traffic Jams in Australia
We noted above the longest jam that we know about in Australia was on the Pacific Highway north of Sydney. It’s interesting to note that when the NRMA was established in 1920 its purpose was to lobby the NSW government for road improvements in the state, and its main target was “the Pacific Highway heading north of Sydney”. Over 90 years later the NRMA is lobbying the Government to make good its target of meeting the 2015 Pacific Highway Upgrade! (note: last year the NRMA’s Red Flag survey voted the Coffs Harbour to Macksville section of the Pacific Highway the worst stretch of road in the state).
On the other hand, according to the IBM Commuter Pain Study, Melbourne is the second best city for avoidance of traffic jams in the world, second only to Stockholm- huh, do you believe that?
So what’s changed? Are governments listening? They are certainly not keeping up with the pace of modern traffic.
Where are the worst roads for congestion in Australia? How do they compare with your experiences here and overseas?
We want to know so let’s hear you on our Facebook page now!
Out-Flanked By The Kiwis? No, not again!
If you were asked “Which country has the highest car ownership in the world (per capita)?”, what would your answer be?
Most would say the USA, but, guess what? They’d be wrong. In fact it doesn’t even figure in the top ten! Worse still, if you were asked who ranks higher, Australia or New Zealand, you’d probably say Australia, but you’d be wrong again, drat it!
The actual top ten car owning nations (according to World Bank data) is as follows:- Click Here To Read More
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