Berend Harmsen, TomTom support engineer at TomTom (2007-present)
Answered March 20, 2018·
Until they bought Waze and started driving with their own mapping vehicles, Google Maps actually were TomTom maps. It’s not too long ago that you could still see sections of Google Maps (maybe even still occasionally) that were TomTom data, same as with Apple.
The real difference is distribution. Since Google streams its mapdata (there is a clunky download feature but that’s barely on par with TomTom offline maps), they can, in principle, have maps that are always up-to-date. TomTom maps on their servers are equally up to date, but the problem is how to distribute these to the devices in a timely manner.
Ideally, you would want the best of both worlds: an offline, detailed basemap - TomTom style - to reduce bandwidth consumptions and performance stability, with overlayed, over-the-air incremental updates of mapchanges and temporary changes (closed for maintenance).
TomTom recently launched the NDS map format, which allows incremental map updates in principle, but that’s an ongoing endeavour that has not yet reached its full potential. That would be the holy grail in map technology, I would say.
But until then, I would say that TomTom’s offline style maps work most of the time, unless you live in an environment that has fast changing road systems, and Google Maps work in an environment that has solid online data coverage.
In terms of traffic information and temporary roadblocks, best routing and ETA estimation I’d say TomTom is unbeatable (full disclosure: TomTom employee here), but things for things like very dynamic environments (lots of map changes in short timespan), location sharing and exchanging, Google is better.
srbabeg: Sorry, you as an employee of TomTom may not be able to objectively comment on the quality of TomTom navigation. Will you be objective and independent. Explain to me how TomTom monitors traffic jams. I don't know if roadside sensors should be mentioned. Where did you see that? Take a look at the TomTom Traffic in Bucharest. Very good display of heavy traffic. Somehow it is not clear to me that until recently poor Romania there are so many sensors. This is overemphasized… I find that TomTom is far weaker in showing traffic congestion in real time than Google Maps. Navigation.
I only admit the facts. These are the facts. In Belgrade (Serbia), TomTom Android Navigation shows traffic jams. But, insufficient and of poor quality.
The first picture shows that TomTom has information about the crowd and suggests a great alternative.
Please explain to me why the TomTom does not show, as usual, the crowd next to the "Ada Mall" Shopping Center, picture below. I knew that there was always traffic congestion on that highway at that time, but I went to check why the traffic was not visible in TomTom. Of course, Navigation Google Maps correctly displays the crowd that is also seen in my driving photos.
The screenshots show that it was the time of the first photo 11:23:46 and the second 11:30:28, which proves that the crowd was really serious. I lost 7 minutes and was late while crossing 500 meters.
I am an ectronics engineer and I must always be precise and correct. I'm not employed by Google Maps! I bought a PDA TomTom Start 42, I have a license for Android TomTom GO Navigation, so I love TomTom Navigation. However, I do not use it because it is a bad display of traffic jams and thus navigation in a big city, such as Belgrade, is unusable. Unfortunately!
Therefore, Google Maps has the best view of traffic jams. That's why I think it's the BEST NAVIGATION. And it will stay that way because other navigations will never be able to accurately show traffic jams. Do you agree, Mr. Harmsen…
Berend Harmsen : I’ll make a few comments:
- I’m no longer a TomTom employee, so I guess I’m objective now
- I mainly covered the quality of the mapdata in the answer, and I was extremely neutral in covering that part of the question
- I closed with a comment about the traffic information and that apparently didn’t sit well with you. I’ll say a few words about traffic info by TomTom then:
TomTom invented the concept of traffic information. Until a few years ago, there was nothing that even came close to what we (I’ll say ‘we’ for convenience) came up with. For almost ten years, we were - in a space where hundreds of wannabe companies were flooding the market with satnav solutions in order to get in on our action - the oly ones even trying this; nobody did traffic measurement. They didn’t know where to start.
Today, only Google comes close, and up until two years ago at least (the last time I was aware of comparative testing having been done) Google was still inferior in terms of identifying traffic jams, but they were definitely (and predictably) improving rapidly. Their main drawback even today seems to be that they are more or less equally able to leverage the same data we do, but our algorithms were better at avoiding so-called ‘ghost jams’. Google traffic info will still often interpret a line stopped at a traffic light as a jam. We only show jams that are not part of normal traffic flow - again Google is getting better all the time. Perhaps they have achieved parity by now, that’s definitely possible.
But the way Google measures traffic is exactly the same as how TomTom invented it twelve years ago: tracking the locations of mobile phones in cars. Today it’s easier to extract actual location data from phones, because there are often enough of them with working GPS on the road at any given time to rely on just that data source. TomTom’s system also leverages a sophisticated algorithm that can extract meaningful traffic information from phones that have no location data by looking at celltower location data. It is amazing that it works, but it does. I find it absolutely stunning that you can look at anonymised phone data and differentiate between those in moving vehicles - that at some point stop moving (traffic jam) - and those who are not in cars. It involves tracing the signal continously (while keeping it anonymised), and it works.
So we have non-gps phones data, gps phone data, data from connected TomTom devices and we have - indeed - access to the road sensors that governments use to monitor road conditions. All that combined creates a traffic feed that is absolutely unparalleled in every objective test that has ever been conducted by any organisation. It does, of course, not mean that it will always be correct, so occasionally you’ll have exception. The system does work better in some places than others. In general, it works better the more advanced and sophisticated a country’s infrastructure is. In western Europe, you can practically always assume the information to be correct. In Greece, for example, the system barely works. Maybe Google has an edge there, because it only uses phone data, so we lose some of our additional data advantage and Google has access to more phones. Google has all the android phones. TomTom has the phones of certain network providers only. And since 90% of all phones are android, they may have more data in less developed environments.
srbabeg :Thank you very much for the really correct answer. Also, thanks for the additional information regarding the system that TomTom uses to track traffic. However, you yourself are obviously aware of the advantage that is already on the side of Google today, because it can monitoring Android phones, of which there are many more than others.
As an engineer and programmer, I wouldn't argue with you because we really don't need to convince ourselves who has a better Real Time Traffic. I drive a lot and every day I compare the quality of these parameters in these two navigations we are talking about. For objective reasons, he limited my testing to Belgrade. However, Belgrade is a big city, it has a very heavy car traffic and that is a growing problem in the normal functioning of the city. I agree, Google shows it as a crowd and standing at traffic lights, but I found that it is not guided by that when proposing a route of ten kilometers. Google algorithms see that this data changes in short time intervals and ignore it. Of course, no any navigation is ideal, no any map ... And I think that TomTom is an extremely high-quality navigation, that's why I bought a PNA device and paid for a license for the Android TomTom version.
As for the traffic monitoring algorithm, I think that the one that TomTom devised is much more complex, so we have the case that in an underdeveloped part of Europe, its information is weak. These countries include Greece, as well as my Serbia and all countries in the Balkan…
Thank you again for a very correct comment. I have been dealing with Navigation for 6 years and you are the first professional person to look at traffic tracking systems in this way. Usually people, at least in my country, do not like free programs because they think they are more important if they have paid navigation and many times we get it illegally…
Many greetings and I wish to you all the best!
Berend Harmsen : Thank you for your gracious reply. I’m geeky enough to love talking about my little areas of expertise and I will admit that even after leaving the company I do feel a certain loyalty to the brand, but I’m not blind to its weaknesses - and there are definitely weaknesses (like any product/brand)
It just happens that from my experience, and I have been involved in a lot of testing on the traffic feature - I have personally conducted many of the comparative tests over the years - and I was just always so astounded by how well the system worked. I was never involved in the development of the feature, but I did a lot of end-to-end testing on our products between 2008 and 2012, the period the traffic feature matured.
I once asked them to provide edge cases for what the system might constitute a traffic jam, based on the absolute minimum of inputs. In other words, I wanted to know what the minimum number of cars you would need, and how far apart they would need to be spaced (and what kind of data source; phone/gps phone/connected TomTom) they would need to have onboard, how far apart they needed to drive - in order to create your own ‘ghost traffic jam’ on a lonely stretch of country road. It was very tricky to accomplish, but we managed to create a one kilometer traffic jam once on an empty stretch of country road by driving with three cars, evenly spaced 500 meters apart, and have them slow down to stopping together so they would be parked 500 meters apart in the middle of nowhere. And it showed up as a 1 km traffic jam on devices running in the office. Not very useful, but it was fun to see the entire complex system correctly triggering based on something you did in the real world.
We have seen the rise of Google on the navigation scene and I have been quite impressed by how well they improve. I still say that things like ‘correct map matching’, ‘accurate forward prediction of position latency’, ‘accuracy of current traffic’ tend to be better on a properly connected dedicated TomTom satnav, and I obviously have enough devices as an ex-employee involved in development to last me a lifetime (assuming you don’t care about having the latest hardware
) - yet I have never used the TomTom app (apart in the capacity of being a beta tester) for my personal navigation needs. I either use one of my dedicated devices or if I find myself with just my phone, I’ll always use Google and it works just fine. I find the massive overhead of downloading many gigabytes of map data on the TomTom device, and the somewhat cumbersome use of storage space (probematic to install on SD card due to android security and such) more trouble than it’s worth: the free Google thing is just too convenient in comparison.
The big advantage of dedicated hardware is that the performance of the system is always optimised. In comparative tests of the TomTom app against our dedicated hardware the PND always wins, even the cheapest models. Part of this is the quality of the gps antenna, which on phones almost always sucks. Space comes at a premium and phone gps antenna’s are the tiniest pieces of metal printed on the circuit board; in your big TomTom box, there’s an actual antenna with a groundplane and everything. The phone software is also more at the mercy of the operating system (TomTom’s operating system is android-based, but it’s very much
based on android; there has been a lot of tweaking going on there). So things like ‘priority of traffic data’ are easier to control when you build the hardware and the software platform.
Anyway, just some more nostalgic thoughts of a former TomTom employee who felt the need to somewhat come to the defense of his former boss
kind regards,
Berend Harmsen
srbabeg : Thank you too for your kind words and heartfelt explanation regarding your big experience in testing TomTom Traffic Jams in Real Time. Many things are clearer to me now. And all praise for the correct and impartial description, regardless of the fact that you still have sympathy for the former company.
Best regards!
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