Traffic situation and road bypasses

[Boštjan Kreutz]

Previous weekend we went on a 3 day trip to visit the famous Italian Dolomiti Passes with our motorcycles. I created a seperate routes for each day prior to our departure. I had my android tablet with me just in case we did some corrections "on the fly". In general everything went more or less ok, no major errors or complications.

An issue I had was the general "avoid toll roads" and "avoid highways" because I wanted to avoid them just in Italy. I didn't want to avoid in in Slovenia, because I already have payed vignette for home country. But even if I could do this in MRA, I am unable to do this in Zumo XT also, so... I had both avoidance enabled and still went on Slovenian highway anyway. Garmin did a lot of recalculations... Not a big problem since I know my way around here, but the route timing was way off because MRA calculated time and distance for normal roads. So we were actually ahead of the schedule right from the start

A little bigger issue was when certain passes were closed. One pass was closed for that day only due to some cycling event. I understand that MRA and Garmin can't know this and therefore we had to do route corrections bellow the pass where the Police and the stop sign were.

Another pass was closed due to road works and this is where I feel that an application upgrade is doable. We were trying to go from Cortina d'Ampezzo to San Cassiano through Falzarego pass. The MRA is trying to navigate us through southern bypass and never through shorter northern road. And we were wondering why?! I had Traffic info enabled but nothing was shown - so I guess that MRA knows that the road is unpassable, but it doesn't show us that. So we had to double check with google maps and yes, google maps does show unpassable road in a really user-friendly way.

Some screens bellow - is there a way to make "road closed" marks more visible in the MRA?
Also is there a way to have "Traffic" always ON?

[Lex.Kloet.RX]

In your case I would have made a route in Slovenia until the border and in XT set highway "on" and in Italy from the border load a route for Italy and set in XT highway "off".
Alternativ: make the route in the MRA planner, set highway "on" and make your route (you will have to use a lot of shapingpoints in Italy). Than export the GPX 1.2 and set your recalculation "off". Your route will guide you as you planned it.

If you, where in my screenshot it says "verkeer", enable traffic, you will see the closed roads.

[Boštjan Kreutz]

@Lex.Kloet.RX Good idea about creating two separate routes to solve the highway problem.
About creating one route and using a lot of shaping points... I thought that the max suggested is about 40 shaping/via points, otherwise Garmin would have problems...
For Garmin XT I also always use GPX 1.1, since that was recomended. GPX 1.2 was said to be for the Zumo XT2 so I never tried it.

But the most important:

If you, where in my screenshot it says "verkeer", enable traffic, you will see the closed roads.

Well... I have Traffic enabled and I don't see road closed. Check the screen I attached in the OP.
I do see that the MRA navigated me on the other road, but I don't see that that happened because of the closed road.