About people most of the time I have precise and unambiguous gut feelings that manifest to be true afterwards, even if totally irrational at the first sight. But my feeling is not about how trustworthy or dangerous they are. It's more about how healthy / happy they generally are, which problems they have and how they do feel right now. I always trust these feelings.
The problem is about situations where I have to decide what to do. Like you taking the freeway or surface streets. For example I am sitting in my room and have just finished something. Now I have two impulses: one physical impulse is to stand up and I feel as if I am sitting on my bike. At the same time I have an impulse of turning to the monitor and I feel the keyboard under my hands. So I don't know what to do. You can interpret it as "intuition says, jump on your bike immediately, and logic says work on your computer because you have a lot to do". And you can interpret it as "intuition says stay at the computer and logic says go out and bike because you want to be fit and you know you need to move a lot and so on". As I don't hear any words it's difficult to know which impulse is what. In your example, I would have one impulse towards the freeway and one towards the surface streets, so I wouldn't know what to do, and seeing the traffic jam I would decide to take the surface streets just like you did.
I'm afraid of not listening enough to my intuition for that reason and the universe having a hard time guiding me...
