The best time to leave to avoid traffic

Navigation apps optimise the road for the traffic that exists the moment you press start. They never suggest the one change that reliably removes delay: leaving at a different time. On a saturated corridor, ten to twenty minutes of patience often saves more than any detour, because a detour still has to share the same overloaded network.

• Morning peak: roughly 07:00–09:00, with the sharpest queues in the middle of that window. Leaving before 06:45 or after 09:15 usually costs far less time.
• Evening peak: roughly 16:00–18:30, and it builds faster than it clears. Fifteen minutes early is worth much more than fifteen minutes late.
• Midweek is worst: Tuesday to Thursday carry the heaviest commuter volume; Monday and Friday are lighter but more unpredictable.
• Fridays and holidays: leisure traffic shifts the evening peak earlier and stretches it, especially the last working day before a holiday.

These patterns describe a typical day. They cannot tell you about the lane closure that started twenty minutes ago, the crash on your only viable alternative, the freezing rain warning, or the roadworks that make tonight nothing like last night. For your actual trip you need the live picture, not the average.

• Compare free-flow with live time. If the live estimate is within five minutes of the free-flow time, just go. A twenty-minute gap means the network is saturated and waiting is on the table.
• Check the cause of the delay. Volume dissolves gradually and rewards waiting. A full closure does not dissolve, so leaving early on a different corridor beats waiting.
• Look at whether the trend is building or easing. Delay that is still growing means your best departure time has not arrived yet.
• Re-check before you actually leave. A decision made thirty minutes ago is a guess. Verify it against the current feeds.

The pre-drive check on the home screen answers exactly this question for your own route. ExitMe.app reads live traffic, weather warnings and official incident feeds, builds real routes around the problem, checks them against your vehicle and emission-zone rules, and then makes one call: leave now, wait, turn back, or take a safe stop. When leaving now is right, the verified route hands straight off to Google Maps.