As a former reporter and editor, I tend to shy away from companies that publish studies that claim to show how great their product or service is; they wouldn’t be publishing these studies if they said their products were bunk, after all. I’m making an exception for this Navteq news, though, since it has the air of legitimacy, including Nu-Stats, a third-party company conducting the research. Perhaps we should take this with a pinch of salt still, but real live traffic services should save you time if you’re on the road a lot.

Anyway, the results of this Navteq-commissioned study reveal that portable navigation devices (PNDs) with a traffic service cut driving time 18 percent per trip on average — a savings of 4 days of driving per year. The results are from a three-pronged study conducted in two metropolitan areas of Germany, Dusseldorf and Munich, which evaluated drivers without a navigation system, drivers with a navigation system, and drivers with a navigation system that included real-time traffic, according to Navteq.

Additionally, the findings show that drivers with real-time traffic experience reductions in distance traveled as well as increase fuel efficiency, which would reportedly lead to a decrease in carbon dioxide emissions per driver of 0.79 metric tons, or 21 percent less than a driver without a navigation system.

Projected onto other countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, shows that U.K. drivers with traffic enabled navigation would save 2.5 days per year and drop their carbon dioxide emissions by 20; U.S. drivers would save 4 days per year and lower emissions by 21 percent, Navteq said. This is taking into account each country’s market size and average annual miles driven.

The research study participants, who had not previously owned a navigation device, had their vehicles outfitted with a logging device which was used to track the route they drove and their driving speed. The study results reflect more than 2,100 individual trips, more than 20,000 kilometers and almost 500 hours on the road.

Frankly, I’m surprised the numbers are the same for the United States and Germany. I’ve spent time in Germany — Munich, to be precise, the site of one of the studies — and I’ve seen how Germans drive, and witnessed their legendary traffic jams.

So, if you’re in the market for a PND, and you drive a lot — say you have a long work commute, you may want to consider one that offers real-time traffic. While these types of services usually involve a fee structure of some sort, it’s becoming more common for PND makers to offer these types of services for free — indefinitely or for a period of a year or two. Of course, if you’ve been reading GPS Maniac, you know this.

And if you really want to cut down your driving time, convince your boss to let you telecommute. Trust me — you can get more done and in less time (you don’t realize how much time you spend goofing off and BS-ing with your co-workers until you begin telecommuting), and your commute consists of walking to and from your desk — or, if you’re like me, you work from a coffee shop and end up spending all the gas money you save on espresso and almond cookies.

If you want a taste of Navteq’s traffic service, check out its web-based version at Traffic.com. That’s where the screen capture above came from, by the way — that’s not what you would see on a PND, per se.

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