take on the Garmin traffic option

With all the advances in GPS technology including true turn by turn directions, brighter screens and actual drawings of the exits, I keep thinking that there is nothing they can do to improve it.    Right now they are super slim, come preloaded with all the maps the screens are nice and big, they run on battery if necessary, they can be used in other countries and come with various voices so Miss GPS doesn't become a nag.    When they started to introduce the traffic option I thought my head would explode and when I started using it, it just seemed beyond revolutionary.. the problem I find though is that these machines are very good at telling you that there is traffic only when you are already sitting in traffic.   

I get on the road yesterday for a 100 mile drive home from Philadelphia to Brooklyn and the GPS tells me the entire trip should take an hour and twenty minutes.   Within 10 minutes I'm sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic and an hour later I've gone a total of 15 miles.   This is the problem, the GPS doesn't tell you that there is upcoming traffic and doesn't steer your away from it but instead turns the little green-car icon into a red-car icon right as you hit the traffic.  Thanks Garmin, I didn't actually see the bumper of the Ford Focus three feet in-front of mine.

So although I don't have any idea what they can do to improve the GPS in anything other than improving the way this traffic concept works because I was thisclose to throwing that $125 machine out the window yesterday as the little red icon taunted me 15 minutes too late.