TomTom Releases Traffic Manifesto With Eye Toward Breaking Traffic Jams

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I’ll be honest, I love my TomTom GPS. It’s worked great for me for a good long while, tells me where I need to go, updates quickly, and even recalculates for me should I decide to violate its preplanned route. But TomTom isn’t stopping there–they’re out to break the traffic jam completely, and to that end, they’ve released the Traffic Manifesto.

It’s part of an overarching program that, not surprisingly, includes getting a whole lot of people–ten percent of all drivers at least–signed up to TomTom’s HD Traffic subscription devices. Of course, the whole “get a subscription to use a device instead of using the earlier devices you bought from us without ever paying us again” thing is definitely present in their “manifesto”, but you can definitely see that whole “social consciousness” thing running through the whole idea.

Considering that the manifesto seems to include a section in which TomTom claims it “must do this for society”, and also included this blurb:

“It (Traffic) can prevent a parent from kissing their child good night. It can make the beginning of a family holiday miserable, instead of fun. Traffic even has psychological and physical health implications that we are only just starting to explore.”

It definitely looks like TomTom has society’s interests at heart, even if it’s a little creepy. But still, TomTom offers a good GPS product, so take that for what it’s worth.