Traffic Bulletins
Posted: Thu 12 September, 2013 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Commuting, Domestic, Driving, Weirdness, Work-related |2 Comments »On my commute, I have the travel bulletins set to be on, which means they interrupt whatever else is playing. (radio or CD) That’s fine – the travel reports are occasionally useful (although more often not) and can give me some warning if the roads are screwed. Mind you, most of the time they don’t do the warnings until I’m already in the jam – although that’s a separate issue.
What does grate though is that my commute appears to be in the footprint of no less than three local radio stations, so I end up getting all of the broadcasts, at roughly the same time. Which usually means that I miss the one I want.
It would be really useful to either
- Be able to ‘mute’ certain stations from the travel report or
- For the stations to have an ident at the start, telling you which station’s broadcast you’re listening to. Then I could quickly cancel the ones I don’t want, in time to hear the one I do want.
Of course, it would also be useful if the presenters weren’t sometimes complete dickknuckles, and manage to screw up the use of the “Travel Alert” button like they did this morning. At some point they’d obviously missed pressing the button, so when they pressed it at the end of the bulletin, it was actually the ‘start’ trigger. Which meant it was screwed for the entire morning. Bell-ends.
Surely the data from the station broadcasting the alert flashes up in your display (even on my 13 year old Broom it does that!)?
In this area I regularly get alerts from London, Essex, Suffolk, and 3 Counties. I just glance at the display and push the button to return to whatever I was listening too, if it’s nto relevant.
But yes, some presenters do forget to press the off button, or hit it an inopportune moments.
It does, but only after a delay. Both Mondeo and Saab did the same thing, which is
And by that time, because they all broadcast at pretty much the same time, I’ve missed the relevant (say, Cambridgeshire) bulletin and instead listened to 3CR wanging on about the M25 being screwed. (Like that’s even newsworthy – surely the M25 running clearly would be more worthy of a mention?)