Why did 511paconnect lie to us? [closed]

Because there was seven miles of backed up traffic between you and the accident. Once the accident was cleared, you had to wait for that to get out of the way.

A lie is an intentional misstatement, meant to mislead you. So I don't think they lied to you. They may have underestimated the time for the traffic backlog to clear, which wouldn't be surprising, given the complexities of traffic situations. There are countless variables that could have affected how long it took to clear traffic - bearing in mind that there are degrees of traffic being clear. If all lanes are shut down, and they get one lane open, traffic at least can start moving again, but it may still take a long time for the backlog to clear.

It sounds to me like this service's primary intention is to help find people who might need rescuing, not to estimate traffic times, and the traffic time estimate is a bonus that perhaps needs some refining. But even the most refined exception estimates are going to be difficult to make.

We got affected a few years ago by mudslides on the Trans-Canada Highway near Golden, British Columbia. The estimates there were quite informative: they gave a time estimate, and then a confidence estimate. In that case, they were expecting an eight-hour closure with low confidence, which meant that they could clear the existing mudslide in about eight hours, but did not have high confidence that more slides wouldn't occur. That was enough for us to divert our route south to BC Highway 3, even though it added about four hours to our route.

Let's look at the numbers. There is a stationary line and you are 7 miles from the incident. Suppose each car takes 10 yards of road (I presume you are in America). That is 176 cars per mile, so about 1200 cars are waiting in each lane.

When the road is cleared, if each vehicle starts moving at 3 second intervals, you will start moving after about 3600 seconds: one hour.