I was going to get the XM traffic but decided against it. I still get the Boston/Philly channel and that's all i really need

 

It seems to be accurate for me in the Seattle area.

 

Suppose the word "traffic" is not on the screen?

 

A few untimely responses, and a few questions.

First, if you don't subscribe to traffic, you do not see "traffic" in the corner. It's not exactly greyed out, it's just not there. I subscribed to XM and Traffic, and it literally took them 2 weeks to activate it. I ended up getting the entire year for free because there was some glitch that they werent able to activate it until they escalated to another department.

Onto my question. I live in Minneapolis, so I have full traffic signals. The couple things I've noticed I am questioning.
-The word Traffic in green - does this ever change? I kind of expected if I was in traffic, it would change to match.
- Rerouting - do I need to manually reroute? Kind of odd that it wouldn't do this on it's own.
- Will the navi reroute me to a non-traffic monitored road? It always seems to tell me there are no alternate routes even though I'm 30 miles from my destination
- There are only a few roads monitored (35, 94, 169) in my area. Are the traffic updates something that are handled by XM, MNdot, or if I update my maps from the 07-08, will they "enhance" the data layer of the maps for more functionality?

Thanks all - just some things I've been thinking about.

 

I can answer some of the questions:
-The word "traffic" in green means that your car is currently recieving the Traffic signal from XM, not your current traffic situation.

-I don't use the re-route feature since I know the roads pretty well. I'm going to try it next time though.

-The map upgrades will not enhance the data layer of maps for additional traffic updates. I upgraded and saw no traffic difference in the NYC area.