You may be familiar with the traffic app Waze. While one can debate its and its users’ accuracy or whether or not using it behind the wheel is safe, there is tremendous convenience in the amount of data the popular app collects. By measuring distances traveled, average speeds, and the amounts of crashes, Waze can get a decent gauge on our commuting habits. Waze officials collected and analyzed data from the Thanksviging holiday and have some interesting findings.
But first, you really need to know what Waze is.
“Waze is 100 percent crowd sourced, so all the data you get within the app is actually provided by our amazing community of users and drivers,” says Waze Global Communications Manager Trak Lord from its headquarters near San Francisco.
Waze doesn’t measure every single car on the roads, but collects data from its growing number of users. A passive user can simply transmit data from a GPS, such as speed or commute time or when the app is turned on. An active user reports crashes or other problems.All users can see data the others report.
Over Thanksgiving week, Atlanta did not have the overall worst traffic.
Out of the 10 biggest cities that Waze measures, Atlanta, however, did have the most reports of “standstills” – where traffic comes to a dead stop. That largest number of those actually registered on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and not Wednesday. New York City, Washington D.C., and Boston had higher reports of crashes and longer delays than Atlanta, because of rainy and snowy weather on Tuesday and Wednesday.
But the pre-Thanksgiving grind actually wasn’t the worst part, Lord says.
“Interestingly enough, Sunday, the day that everyone comes back, had a very similar trend in how severe the traffic was.” And Lord has some good advice. “Everyone wants to say that Wednesday is the worst travel day, but I’m willing to say Sunday is. I say next year for Thanksgiving, come back on Saturday or Monday. Because basically no one is driving, not even on Black Friday.”
People have several days to travel for Thanksgiving, but most come back on the same day – Sunday.
Lord did point out that Atlanta drivers and those in other cities Waze measures tended to drive further on Thanksgiving and Black Friday than they would on a normal workday. Lord says Atlanta Waze users normally drive about 20 miles on a weekday, but last Thursday and Friday actually averaged over 40 miles.
The most stunning fact in Waze’s data seemingly bodes well for the economy. This Thanksgiving week was the most traveled week in the past five years. That matches up with the kind of rush hours we have been seeing in recent months.
Atlanta traffic is a bear, but with Waze we now have some harder numbers to back up what we have been seeing. Interstate delays were worse than ever before and after Thanksgiving Day 2014, falling in step with the horrendous rush hours we have had all year.
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