How I Beat the Traffic on My Daily Commute

At ITSumma, we do so much monitoring and analytics for high-traffic websites, it’s only natural that some of that mindset would spill over into another high-traffic situation: my daily commute. So I decided to write a fun little blogpost where I reveal how I found the best time to get to work, and the best time to get home.

I commute by car from Sunnyvale, CA to San Francisco (Harrison/8th) almost every day, and since I don’t punch a clock, I’m pretty flexible about when I can drive there so, being naturally analytical, I hopped over to Google Maps and had a look at their traffic data to find the best time for my commute.

Here’s a screenshot I took, with some helpful “pointers”:

August 27th was a Sunday, so traffic was pretty light, but as the work week starts, you can see a highly regular pattern emerge: the morning rush starts to pick up at about 5 AM, and peaks at around 8, after which it settles down into a nice little dip between 10:30 and noon. There’s about a 40-to-50-minute window there where you can dart over before the second wave of traffic hits. If I left work right at 5 PM like a good clock-puncher, it would take me almost 1.5 hours to get back to Sunnyvale.

So, here’s my conclusion: the best time to drive from SF to the Valley is after 8 PM; there’s a small increase in traffic between 10 PM and midnight, which usually represents roadwork while there’s still some traffic. It’s also interesting that the pattern is accurate to the minute: the best time to get to work is 10:30 — not 10:15, not 10:45 — almost every day. One more thing to mention is that the traffic spikes in the middle of the week, as shown below, so your best bet for a round-trip commute is on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays.

I hope this little tale inspires you to be more analytical in your everyday life, to make things run just a little bit smoother. Remember: analytics is your friend!