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Google Looked at Thanksgiving Traffic and You'd Better Leave Town Now

Google Maps

Millions of Texans are taking to the road and skies this year for Thanksgiving travel, and for the first time, Austinites will have some new data to help them decide when to head out on the highway. They'll need it, because Austin has the second biggest increase in traffic during Thanksgiving week in the entire country, according to Google.

After crunching the numbers from their mapping data from the last few years, Google Maps has some advice for you: Leave. Now. Before it's too late. 

"We found that in Austin, Wednesday is going to be the worst day to travel," says Latoya Drake with Google Trends. "But we went a little bit deeper to see when you're going to see the most volume on the roads. And that's between 2 and 4 pm [Wednesday]."

So, if you can avoid Wednesday, especially the afternoon, you'll be better off. But not much better. Because today, Tuesday, is the 3rd worst day for road travel in Austin this holiday weekend.

On your way back, you're better off coming back on Sunday than Saturday, which is the 2nd worst day for road traffic this week. Saturday traffic is about 13 percent worse than Sunday, according to Google. 

So, what's the best day to travel? Not surprisingly, it's Thanksgiving day itself.

Here's a full infographic via Google: 

Credit Google

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