Google maps has "updated" traffic info.. discovered while stuck in traffic

This was a chance discovery.

Yesterday we had to pay a condolence visit for a elderly relative who had passed away. The residence was in Ramesh Nagar. We reached there by about 8:15 pm. It was raining quite heavily.

After paying our last respectsm we started back at about 10 pm. We wanted to take an alternate route and used google maps to get that route. We were advised to take the Old Airport road route as it was late in the night. We started and hit the Old Airport road.

The traffic towards city was stalled, I thought being so late it will get cleared. But it was not, it took us about two hours to get home. It was one of those rainy days and parts of Old Airport road were flooded.

I suddenly recollected that the google map, I had searched for the alternate route, was showing parts of the road in red color (see image), which indicates heavy traffic. I pulled out the phone and looked at the map. We could see that the almost the entire stretch till Old Airport was red, it took us a long time, almost one and half hour to cover this stretch.

The route after the old airport did not have much red and we could cover that stretch quickly.

I had noticed that google maps gives alternate routes with indicative time difference, which I had used to make it to meetings just in time in the past. But it was a surpise that this info was up to date so late in the night, It is a good thing to know.