How to Determine Usual Traffic Conditions
According to U.S. News and World report, the average American's driving commute is 24 minutes, so finding an efficient route by determining usual traffic conditions could literally save hours of time a week. This will take a little data collection and observation, but the time spent doing that will likely make up for the time saved in the long run.
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Instructions
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1
Find a website that reports conditions on the route for which you want to determine traffic conditions. Often local radio stations will post traffic reports for major roads and highways. A great resource is SmarTraveler, which will direct you to local traffic resources for most large cities.
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2
Choose a route or multiple routes to track. Usually there are alternative routes from one point to another, so choose two or three to track simultaneously to make the conclusions from the data more meaningful.
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3
Choose a time period to track. This time period should be the approximate time you plan on traveling the route, but you should include about an hour buffer on either side to see if it will be advantageous to leave earlier or later.
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4
Enter the time period's traffic data into a spreadsheet. Relevant information would be accidents, construction and any other obstruction that may cause delays, such as a pileup. Any traffic reporting service will report the delays, as well as descriptors such as "sluggish," "clear" or "slow-moving," which is information you should also enter.
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5
Enter the average moving speed, if available, into the spreadsheet. Not every traffic service will have this specific information, but many of the larger, traffic-heavy cities do provide average speed estimates. One example is Los Angeles, which tracks the average speed on its larger roads and highways at its traffic info site.
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Enter weather conditions on the spreadsheet. This is a huge factor in affecting traffic, and different routes may respond differently during a rainstorm or snow. Use Weather.com or local news sites to determine what the weather might be in a certain area.
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Repeat Steps 4 through 6 for at least a week. The longer you keep the data, the more accurate the average will be and the more conclusions you will be able to draw from variables like weather and traffic.
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8
Calculate the mean moving speed on the route, if you have access to that data. Simply add up the average speed from each day and then divide by the total number of days. For example, if you calculated the mean speed of three days where the speeds were 30, 25 and 35, the equation would be "mean = 30 + 25 + 35/3." The result would be 30, meaning that you could expect traffic to move at 30 mph on any average day.
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9
Create symbols for variables like accidents, slowdowns and weather delays. For instance, you might choose a = accidents, s = slowdowns and r = rain delay.
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10
Calculate the probability of the various delays. Similarly to Step 8, you will simply add up the number of delays and divide by the total number of days. For instance, if you have two accidents in 10 days, the equation would be "2a/10," which would equal .2a. This means that there is a 20% probability of an accident occurring on the given route during the given time period.
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Correlate predictable conditions to speed, if you have the speed data. Weather, for instance, is a fairly predicable condition because you can look outside and see if it's raining or snowing. Look to the spreadsheet and add up only the speeds from the days when it is raining and then divide by the total number of days you added so that you can determine the speed you might expect if it is raining.
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Tips & Warnings
This method is only useful as a probability exercise and will not guarantee absolute results, as there are, in reality, so many variables that total knowledge is impossible. However, the more data you are able to gather, the more accurate you are likely to be.
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