Christmas isn’t until Friday, but drivers start hitting the roads for holiday trips on Wednesday, AAA warns — and that’s when the congestion becomes worst, according to the driving app company Waze.
Illustration from AAA
Waze provides an app for drivers to check what traffic slowdowns lie in wait on their routes (and which takes data from moving cell phones and reports from its subscribers to see where the slowdowns are).
Last year, Waze said on its blog, traffic got noticeably worse two days before Christmas (this year, that would be Wednesday), with a 19 percent increase in “accident alerts” on the app and a 13.4 increase in traffic jams. There was a 14.4 percent rise in accident alerts on the day before Christmas.
Waze concludes: “Wednesday is the worst day to drive.” If you do have to drive that day try to start early: “We see the largest increase in app usage this day, starting at 11 a.m. through end of day.”
The best day to travel, according to Waze: Christmas Day itself. Around the world, Waze said, in 2014 there was below-average use of their app all day long.
Expect more traffic this year than ever before, the AAA warns: For the first time, the number of road travelers this year will rise above 100 million this holiday, and in New England, “increases in travel are expected to outpace the national increases.” An AAA survey says holiday travel will be up 1.4 percent nationwide, but 2.2 percent in New England.
“An estimated 100.5 million Americans – nearly 1 in 3 people – will travel more than 50 miles over the 12 days of the upcoming Christmas holiday,” says a news release from AAA Northeast, the American Automobile Association’s regional affiliate.
According to the announcement, holiday travel this for the end of 2015 “is the seventh consecutive year of year-end holiday growth for travel between Dec. 23, 2015 and Jan. 3, 2016.”
Of this year’s holiday travelers:
- Nearly 91 percent (91.3 million) plan to travel by motor vehicle;
- 5.7 percent plan to fly
- “The remaining 3.4 percent (3.4 million) travelers will take some other mode of transportation, including one traveler who plans to make a round-the-world journey by sleigh late Dec. 24.”
What’s fueling the increase: “Rising incomes, lower gas prices, higher employment and low crude oil prices” — in other words, times are better.
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