Here are the 5 cities you might want to avoid this Raya

Hari Raya is approaching and we all know what that means: It’s a long weekend with good food, festivities and great company. But, there’s also one other thing that’s nearly unavoidable for those who are travelling out of town and that’s traffic jams.

But we may have a quick and easy guide that can help you out.

If you’ve been driving in Malaysia and have a smartphone, odds are, you would probably have heard of the immensely popular social navigation app Waze. It’s often useful for finding the quickest way to your destination while also avoiding traffic jams.

Today, there are 2.5 million users in KL alone, contributing 1.2 million alerts each month, driving over 288 million km/month. With all that data, Waze decided to help Malaysians out by compiling data from last year’s Raya rush and coming up with a set of predictions that forecast the most congested cities in Peninsular Malaysia this festive season. Here are their top 5:

So, if you’re planning on going for a holiday, our suggestion would be to avoid these cities as best you can. From the chart, people who are not going to balik kampung should avoid going to the north altogether as the top 3 cities that see the most influx of traffic all lie in the north of the peninsular. However, if your kampung lies in these five areas, then there’s only one thing we can say: May the odds be ever in your favour.

If you’re from outside of KL, this is the best time to visit the city because there will be fewer drivers, far fewer jams and fewer accidents throughout the entire week.

Those heading to Kota Bharu should pay extra attention to safety on the road because Waze predicts that accidents could increase by as much as 500%.

Waze also encourages users to use its “Planned Drives” feature (accessible through the pull-out menu) when you want to travel somewhere. When you set a date and time of arrival, the application will alert you when you should leave, taking into account things like expected traffic conditions and aggregated traffic history. According to Waze, this is to avoid the “exodus” effect, where everyone leaves at the same time and causes a crazy jam.

We’d also like to wish all our readers safe travels when travelling this festive season. Drive safe guys!