The estimated delay going over the GW Bridge from New Jersey always seems to be ridiculously optimistic.
The other way seems fine. But I can’t count the number of times GMaps has said 20 minute delay and it’s been over an hour to go those three miles in Fort Lee. I feel like Chris Christie has hacked that part of Google Maps.
This was my experience crossing the Canadian/US border this summer – it was off by over an hour. The border crossing includes an express lane for pre-screened vehicles. My suspicion is that the Google algorithm did not know how to resolve the differences between the different lanes (5 minutes vs. 90 minutes). Perhaps something similar with the GW Bridge?
We have tolled express lanes on our interstates here. So 2 lanes where you pay, and 3-5 where you don’t. Often the express lanes are driving at 80-90mph while the non-express lanes at the same spot are doing 5-10mph. Google finds this baffling.
And yes, when somebody from the non-express lanes decides to jump through a small gap in the plastic poles and join the high-speed express traffic, usually without looking and definitely without considering the relative speeds, very impressive accidents result. Daily.
Miami driving is speshul that way.
I have a similar question.
A few years back, I noticed on a long drive that the arrival time never changed, even though I was speeding. Not massively so - let’s say the speed limit was 70 and I was going between 75 and 80.
For a drive of an hour or less, any arrival time tweaking would be insignificant. But I’d set a destination about 300 miles away. At 70 MPH, that’s 4.28 hours. At 75 MPH, that’s exactly 4 hours - so, about 17 minutes faster. But my estimated arrival time wavered only by a minute or two.
So my best guess is that there IS some assumption of speeding built in - possibly based on average speed of other cars on the road. Certainly I’ve seen arrival times get extended when there’s heavy traffic.
I thought you were in the DC metro area until I reread your post and saw “Miami”. We have similar HOT lanes. Google Maps sometimes reacts to that, sometimes not. It also gets very, very confused when I take a very specific exit off of the beltway (from the HOT lanes), which goes a very different route than the regular-lane exit.
When I was commuting a while ago I noticed that the given speed for the freeway was an average of the faster HOV lane and the slower regular lanes.
14 hours 46 minutes
I just did the White House to Mar-a-Lago route and got 14h 2m for 997 miles.
It is clear Google takes current traffic into account. If I map a local route (say within 20 miles) Google will color code the route with red, yellow to let me know of slow places and it is clearly calculating traffic flow to estimate my time. If I map a route at 3a I get a different time than if I map it at 3p.
I think Google must be tracking phones that are on those same roads and sampling the time it takes them to move on certain sections and uses that data to give me a time estimate.
More is happening than calculating the speed limit on those roads.