Highways England and Traffic Scotland are good but only cover trunk routes.

The standard digi-traffic page on the company supplied Garmin in my lorry keeps me out of most trouble, when i see a major delay developing a quick phone call to SWMBO who consults google traffic usually confirms with either being slightly more accurate at the time, i too haven't used Waze but then i don't have a smartphone so can't comment.

The biggest problem is trying to find out when overnight (so affecting my early starts) road closures and restrictions are on or off, travelling out of normal hours can be frustrating unless you have some method of traffic reporting.

Probably not answering what you were looking for at all, but as i'm on a roll...:-)

I was an early user of Trafficmaster's YQ units, and was sad when the analogue system was shut down, but in practice the digi traffic on new higher spec Garmins is proving to be the modern equivalent and i am a happy bunny again.

Worth checking out, take no notice of Garmin technical they don't appear to know what their own products can do, before the company supplied the new units i was looking to see if the new digi traffic could be used as a stand alone traffic monitor, ie without a destination being programmed in (after 40 years i know where i'm going, plus i want to know about traffic in the surrounds not just on the road it wants me to use), the helpful chap at Halfords phoned Garmin tech to see if the units could be used like this? the older ones with analogue traffic could.

No was the answer, a destination has to be entered, so i didn't buy.

Gald i didn't buy as few weeks later the new company units went in, within 5 mins i'd established what couldn't apparently be done, stand alone traffic on the unit, which is handy because i can scroll the whole country just as you would google maps-traffic checking for delays on or near any of the possible routes.

So if thats of any interest it might be worth visiting a sat nav store and having a play with a new higher spec Garmin (with digi traffic) to see if it suits you...note the car power lead includes the traffic signal receiver so it may not work in store depending how its powered on the display.

The traffic information on Google maps is good, although the presentation is slightly different. It shows the speed of flow of the traffic, rather than specific incident reports (it does show some of those, but much less reliably). However, the fact that it shows it for *every* road (I think it's harvested from those using Google Maps on their smartphones) does mean you can see exactly where trouble is on your whole route.

The AA has a traffic news site that is reasonable, and more like the BBC's (former) presentation

I've also heard Waze is good, but haven't used it, so can't say for certain what it's like.

Thanks.

I've bookmarked all. The AA site looks to be the most useful. The Waze site seems to rely on travellers reports, although this should be more up to date.