Have you ever been stuck in traffic during the heavy morning commute, or found yourself late for dinner plans because you left work right in the middle of the Friday night traffic? In addition to using Google Maps to find alternate routes and reach your destination faster, you may have also found the feature that shows typical traffic patterns on highways to be useful. Knowing the usual highway conditions during certain times of the day, like rush hour, can help you avoid traffic. And if you plan to avoid these highways, it’s also helpful to know the typical traffic patterns on the surrounding arterial roads as well.
Starting today, if you’re planning a trip for which you anticipate traffic, you can find out what typical traffic is like on these arterial roads, rather than just on highways. Simply type in your starting and ending points to get directions in Google Maps, enable the traffic layer on the upper right hand side of the viewport, and then click “change” in the legend to switch from live traffic to Typical Traffic for these roads.
Click traffic layer and then select day and time
You can now access this data for important arterials in cities around the world to help you get where you want to go, and on time! To illustrate the improved comprehensiveness of the traffic data now available, below are the before and after traffic screenshots for London:
London traffic for both highways and major roads
We wish you safe and happy driving!
Posted by Szabolcs Payrits, Software Engineer, Google Maps
