During a cross country trip, I keyed in a destination that was 2 hours away, through both urban and rural areas and through varying levels of rush hour traffic. I know they have ways of measuring instantaneous traffic levels, but how can they predict road conditions for multi-hour journeys?
In: 8
Basically they try their best and then cheat.
They are constantly updating your “time left” with whats going on at the current moment.
So for example, if Google maps says the drive will take 30 minutes the second you leave and you speed the entire time or catch a lucky break in traffic. Let’s say you go twice as fast for the first 10 minutes as you were supposed to.
If that 30 minute thing was just a timer then when you hit start it would just be ticking down 30 minutes. So after 10 it would say 20 minutes left, except it doesn’t. It updates with the new info as it’s happening, so after 10 minutes if you’ve covered 20 minutes worth of distance the “time remaining” on the display will say 10 minutes left.
1 minute left and it says 1 minute, then you get there and it says “arriving now” or “your destination is on the left” or whatever and it seems like it was exactly right the whole time.
You can tell this is what’s happening because sometimes it will think you will be stopped at a red light for 3-4 minutes and you catch a break and it’s green the second you pull up. Watch the timer, it will instantly jump down 3-4 minutes. It’s very effective gaslighting.
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