Microsoft Streets & Trips

Truck Stops Plus

ecommerce provided by Yahoo! Small Business

Why Microsoft Streets & Trips?

Because it is not only the best selling and lowest priced routing and GPS navigation solution on the market today, it is also the most accurate, intuitive, flexible, and by far the easiest and user-friendliest of all the solutions available as well. Some other routing and navigation software costing many times more money may advertise that they are trucking specific software, but talk to anyone who has actually used those products before and if they are completely honest, they will not only tell you that those products can’t be relied upon to do truck specific routing, but also that those products are many times harder to learn and use as well.

In addition, Microsoft Streets & Trips 2011 list for just $39.95 (cheaper than a laminated Motor Carrier Road Atlas), while its competing products list for as high as $199.00, and when you have to buy the product each and every year in order to get the new and updated maps, $39.95 a year is much easier on your pocket book than $199.00, and also for a product that is more accurate, more flexible, more user-friendly, and also saves you more time routing and planning your trips. More expensive doesn’t always necessarily translate into better!

Plus if you have never used Microsoft Streets & Trips before you will be happy to learn that it contains street level mapping for every village, town, and city in the USA and Canada. Try finding street level mapping in a Motor Carrier Road Atlas; except for major roads in major cities, it doesn’t exist! Which also, by the way, makes your job that much easier because now you can follow your final directions to each shipper and consignee on the Microsoft Streets & Trips maps long before you ever drive it. Thus, don’t wait until you are driving to your shippers and consignees to discover that your directions are wrong the hard way, find out long before you drive and have plenty of time to correct your directions beforehand. It’s not only much easier; it’s also much safer and less stressful too!

Other major advantages:

With Microsoft Streets & Trips you will be able to scroll through maps far faster than you can flip through pages in a Motor Carrier Road Atlas.

Make the maps as big or as little as you need them to be, so seeing the maps with or without glasses is never a problem.

Figuring exact miles from point A to point B or from truck stop A to truck stop B can be accomplished in a matter of a few seconds.

Finding hard to find towns and cities or hard to find roads is a snap with Microsoft Streets & Trips and can be accomplished in just a few clicks.

Route and plan your trips in a small fraction of the time than it takes to do it the old fashioned manual way and drive far less out of route miles too, translating into more free time for you and more money in your pocket.

Always know the exact speed you are traveling, the exact distance to your next stop, the exact miles to final destination, the direction of travel, the altitude, and the time remaining at a glance.

Never used routing and GPS navigation software before and you are looking for a good excuse to try it? The first time that you have to make a delivery early in the morning before the sun rises and the fog is so thick that you can cut it with a knife, you will appreciate using routing and GPS navigation software. For those times when it is so dark and foggy that you can barely see the road much less read the road signs, Microsoft Streets & Trips will give you easy to follow voice guided and visual turn-by-turn directions and take you right to your destination with ease, fog or no fog!

Combine Microsoft Streets & Trips or MapPoint with the Truck Stops Plus 2011 Template and together you have the best GPS routing and navigation solution available for truck drivers that money can buy!

Microsoft Streets & Trips 2011 is here! Download the trial edition and run it for 60 days free. Microsoft Streets & Trips 2011

What's The Truth About Truck Specific Routing?

The bottom line is the individual professional driver will always ultimately be responsible for ensuring that his or her truck routes are legal for 18 wheelers and don't contain any restricted routes and low clearances. I'm sorry to say that despite the many advertising claims made by many makers of GPS devices today, there is still no product available on the market that can be trusted to do truck specific routing reliably, and to be honest I highly doubt that there ever will be when you consider the complexities involved with the compilation of maps on such a large and monumental scale, the limitations of technology, and the fact that nothing ever remains static because we live in an ever changing environment.

Couple the above with the fact that at the time the best GPS devices are released for sale to the general public, the maps they contain are 2 to 3 years already behind at best, then it is easy to understand why it is very highly improbable that there will ever be a trucking specific GPS device that will be capable of doing truck routing good enough to be relied upon by professional drivers.

Moreover, just because professional drivers use the latest GPS technology as a routing and navigation tool, it doesn’t absolve professional drivers from their responsibility to plan their routes and ensure that the routes they travel on are legal for 18-wheelers.

Unfortunately, all products today that currently advertise that they do truck specific routing in actuality really does pseudo truck routing. That is they will usually route via major highways because most of the time major highways are also legal for 18-wheelers. In fact, you can configure Streets & Trips and MapPoint to do the very same thing. Nonetheless, you must keep in mind that these so-called truck specific GPS devices can and will route you down a restricted route road or a road with a low clearance too on occasion making them unreliable.

Another very disturbing feature about these so-called truck specific GPS devices is they all feature auto-rerouting. Now, auto-rerouting is an excellent feature for cars, but if you are driving a 73-foot long 18-wheeler, you are in actuality putting your job and career on the line each and every time you use this feature, since these GPS devices can route you down a residential area, a restricted route road, a road with a low clearance, a road with a low weight limit bridge, etc. just as easy as they can route you down a road that is legal for 18-wheelers. Of course, the disclaimer you see and agree to by using their device allows them to get away with this with impunity.

In addition, these so-called truck specific GPS devices provide no way to turn the auto-rerouting feature off. Thus, you have no choice in the matter and are forced to use the auto-rerouting feature regardless no matter what. Hence, every time you turn off your route to enter a weigh station, go to a rest area, or a truck stop, for instance, the device will automatically recalculate the route from that point forward.

Streets & Trips, on the other hand, also comes with auto rerouting. However, with Streets & Trips you can easily toggle the feature on and off, and we at Truck Stops Plus for safety reasons highly recommend that you toggle this feature off to prevent Streets & Trips from recalculating your route every time you enter a weigh station, rest area, or truck stop.

Now, if a professional driver likes his or her driving career and really wants to keep it, then that professional driver will never travel down any road unless he or she knows beforehand that it is legal for 18-wheelers. However, with these so-called truck specific GPS devices, professional drivers can’t plan their trips beforehand, since every time they exit to go to a weigh station, rest area, or a truck stop thanks to the auto-rerouting feature that can't be turned off the route automatically will get recalculated and each time it gets recalculated, depending upon where you are relative to your final destination, it is possible that the route could get recalculated differently.

Not only that but today most truck companies supply their professional drivers with a legal truck route. Which is great if you use Streets & Trips or MapPoint because you can just simply synchronize the route in Streets & Trips or MapPoint with the company-supplied legal truck route and then save it.

However, it is impossible to synchronize the company supplied legal truck routes in these so-called truck specific GPS devices because of the auto-rerouting feature that can’t be turned off and that will also automatically recalculate the route every time you turn into a weigh station, go to a rest area, or stop at a truck stop. Thus, planning your trips beforehand and ensuring that your routes are legal for 18-wheelers is literally impossible.

Hence, not only do you have to pay a premium price for the privilege of owning one of these so-called truck specific GPS devices that does pseudo truck routing at best, but also if you actually use it to do your job, you jeopardize your driving career every time it recalculates the route, which inevitably will be numerous times each day.

As a matter of fact, if a professional driver gets a ticket or worse for going down a restricted route road or for hitting a low overhead, it will be the professional driver who is ultimately held responsible and not whatever GPS device the professional driver happened to be using at the time.

Thus, the ideal GPS solution for professional drivers will not only be flexible enough so that you can easily customize your routes, toggle off the auto-rerouting feature, and add multiple stops and optimize those stops as necessary, but it will also provide a fast and convenient way for professional drivers to easily verify and confirm their routes are legal for 18-wheelers, and the only product on the market today at this time other than a Motor Carrier Road Atlas that currently does this is the Truck Stops Plus 2011 Template combined with Streets & Trips or MapPoint, since the Truck Stops Plus 2011 Template provides professional drivers with a very simple and fast solution for easily verifying their routes are legal for 18-wheelers right from the convenience of their laptop screen.

Furthermore, if it is simple, easy, fast, and convenient then more professional drivers will make it a habit to always verify and confirm their routes are legal for 18-wheelers before they begin driving their trips.

Moreover, the other primary reason why professional drivers prefer a trucking specific GPS solution is for the ability to search and route to trucking specific POIs in seconds, and the Truck Stops Plus 2011 Template not only contains the largest and most accurate trucking specific POI database available today, but it also is the only trucking specific POI solution available today that has been created, designed, and tailor made specifically for professional drivers and therefore provides the pertinent information that professional drivers require the most.

Other POI databases contained on these portable so-called truck specific GPS devices may tell you there is a particular truck stop at such and such location, but if it doesn't tell you the parking size and otherwise give you the other pertinent information you require, then it isn't information that is useful. Not to mention that the other POI databases were geocoded by addresses and as a result will more often than not be off by several hundred yards or more, and that could potentially force you to drive for miles out of route looking for a safe and legal place to turn around.

Additionally, the Truck Stops Plus 2011 Template combined with Streets & Trips or MapPoint is the only solution that lets you see the exact locations of individual POIs on the maps not only when trip planning, but also as you are driving and traveling down the roads in America and Canada. Indeed, it’s like having your own personal advanced high tech radar system right there in the truck with you.

Get the Truck Stops Plus 2011 Template today and you will never use another antiquated truck stop directory ever again.

Laptop or portable standalone GPS device?

Wondering if you should go with a laptop or a portable standalone GPS device? The answer is academic, go with the laptop because besides giving you a much larger panoramic view that you will appreciate and that you can’t get otherwise with a small portable standalone GPS device, it’s also a much more flexible solution because with a laptop you can multi-task by, for example, opening up several instances of Microsoft Streets & Trips simultaneously and keeping the ones that you are not immediately using minimized and running in the background, then use them when the need arises for several different jobs simultaneously. For instance, one job, of course, would be for GPS navigation and guidance, another one might be for quickly figuring mileages between different points, another one might be for creating new routes around unexpected detours, another one could be for searching and routing to truck stops and Wal-Mart Supercenters quickly, another one could be for deciding to accept or decline preplans, and so on. The laptop gives you a level of flexibility and convenience that just isn’t available with portable standalone GPS devices, also making you much more efficient, and when it comes to planning trips, nothing beats Microsoft Streets & Trips on a laptop since it was trip planning software long before it eventually morphed into navigation software too.

Further, you also can’t cruise the Internet, check your email, do instant messaging, watch movies, download music, etc. either with a portable standalone GPS device. Not to mention that you will also want to download a licensed copy of the Drivers Daily Log software in order to keep the safety department and the DOT off your back.

In addition, one of the primary justifications for purchasing a portable standalone GPS device cited by professional drivers is so they won't have to purchase a laptop. However, if you buy one of those standalone so-called truck specific GPS devices that only does pseudo truck routing, you also are required to have a laptop and an Internet connection to do the constant updates these units require. Therefore, not only is the justification for going with a portable standalone GPS device thus defeated, but it is also a far more expensive alternative as well because you not only have to have a laptop but you also have to maintain Internet access to receive the constant updates.

Do you want to mount your laptop in your car, truck, or RV, but can't justify spending $275 on a laptop mount? This company sells great laptop mounts for under $50.00: www.mobilelaptopmount.com

Back to stop