The drive to the cottage is always full of the promise of a good time ahead. The drive back is an unfortunate necessity. In either case, traffic can get in the way.
Here are some helpful tools available to us to avoid that traffic, find an alternate route, or simply wait out the worst of it. Nothing new here, AM radio stations have been providing cottage country traffic for decades and continue to do so to this day. You can tune in to your favourite AM news station and they’ll help you avoid the trouble spots.
The province also provides up-to-the-minute traffic and transit information through Ontario 511, available online at 511on.ca . The province’s tool may lack some of the ease of use of Google Maps , but it is quite good at pinpointing construction projects along your way, including start and end times, reported traffic jams and incidents, weather issues and more.
It can generate various routes for your drive as well. Google Maps is certainly not the only useful live GPS tool out there for your smartphone but it has come a long way in recent years and has been showing drivers the quickest route to their destination, including via back roads, all based on real-time traffic conditions. You can also use Google Maps on your home computer to map your route, the way we did 15 years ago, but the smartphone app is far more sophisticated than that.
Other useful GPS apps include Waze, Apple Maps, Here WeGo, INRIX and there are others as well. Lastly, if you can book additional .
