The 4th of July falls right in the middle of the week this year which means holiday traffic may not be as bad as it would if the 4th was on a Monday or Friday. That doesn’t mean there won’t be traffic, though, and nothing can kill a holiday buzz like getting stuck in a traffic jam. Google Maps is trying to help you keep your buzz going with Independence Day traffic predictions for 25 cities.
Google maps gives you two ways to look at traffic patterns ranging from July 3rd to the 6th. A chart (partially shown below) illustrates the differences throughout the day between holiday traffic and traffic on a normal work day. Traffic in all the cites increases around midnight on July 3rd as people arrive to visit family and friends. Some cites peak before midnight and some after which can be useful to know if you're visiting for the holiday.
There's also an interactive feature that gives you a close-up of traffic density throughout each day for each of the 25 cities. It's a good way to fine tune arrival and departure times whether you live in the city or are a holiday visitor.
Google Maps based its predictions on anonymized data that logged the number of cars on the road and the speed at which they traveled from July 3rd to July 6th 2017. The 4th of July fell on a Tuesday last year and more people may have taken Monday off to have a four-day weekend than are extending their weekend by taking two days off this year. If that’s the case, traffic densities from last year may not be accurate predictors for travel times this year for those who are traveling some distance to visit family and friends on the 4th. I’d love to see Google Maps’ post-holiday assessment of the accuracy of their traffic predictions.
Predicting holiday traffic patterns is a difficult but potentially valuable undertaking. Google Maps real-time traffic overlay is generally excellent which indicates they are collecting the right data and analyzing it the right way. However, holidays present a thorny problem because traffic patterns are highly atypical and data can only be collected once a year. The data set for each city is thin (unless Google has been collecting these data for years) and thus vulnerable to confounding factors like weather.
Google has the resources and expertise to partially compensate for limited data with sophisticated models of traffic flow that can be refined as the data accumulates over time. Whether the company has an interest in carrying out a long-term project like this remains to be seen. If they do, reliable predictions for high-traffic holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas/New Years and the 4th of July could make life easier for hundreds of thousands of people.
[Update. A confusion about the information shown in the chart has been corrected.]
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