An increasing number of people are becoming GPS owners these days. I still remember the time I bought my first GPS unit in summer 2005. A lot of my friends were amazed by the utility of the little device back then. Today it is almost like a must-own for a car-owner and is probably as common as owning an iPod.
Like me, if you have ever spent some time taking a look at the various settings of a GPS device, you probably know that most devices out there have an ‘Avoid Toll-roads’ feature that I sometimes find particularly useful. Most GPS maps these days (depending on how up-to-date they are) have detailed information on which highways have toll-booths and at what locations. Based on this information, if you set the device to avoid toll-roads, it can successfully take you around the toll, thereby saving you some money. However a couple of points to keep in mind when using this feature:
- Most of the times, the detour is longer or takes more time to cover than taking the toll-road. What I do in most cases is to check the route plan before and after I turn on the ‘Avoid Toll-roads’ setting, and if avoiding the toll-road is going to increase my journey time or distance considerably, then I choose to just take the toll-road instead.
- Weigh the amount of money you would save on tolls versus the amount you would spend on the additional gas to take the (usually longer) detour. Avoid the toll-road only if the numbers make sense.
- Sometimes it may not even be about the money. It may just be that there are extremely long queues at the toll-booths, especially during rush hour. In such cases, if time is of the essence, then avoiding the toll-roads may make more sense.
- Make sure you turn the ‘Avoid Toll-road’ setting off after you are done with you journey. Some devices like mine, have this setting at the global level and if I leave this setting on, all routes that I calculate on this device will try to avoid toll-roads, until I turn the setting off. This may not be a concern for devices where this can be set for each route that is calculated.
- There may not always be a way around the tolls and if this is the case, your device will tell you so.
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