The holiday season is upon us, but while that brings a lot of joy and fun times for most, there is always the issue of getting caught in traffic jams when you balik kampung and then again when you return to KL. The good news is that popular navigation application Waze is here to help ease your traffic woes.
Waze is a social navigation platform that relies on its user base to find the best routes to your destination. Things like user-generated accident and traffic jam reports are instrumental in ensuring the service can find the most optimal route to your destination.
Right now, Waze has over 2 million monthly active users in Kuala Lumpur alone. These users collectively travel 288 million km and contribute nearly 1.2 million traffic and road alerts every month.
With that many reports streaming in, the service gets a lot of valuable traffic data and with that data, they’ve come up with a quick PSA infographic on when the best times are to travel back to KL from your kampung.
According to Waze, the best time to drive back from your holidays on Sunday is before 11am, while those who are planning to come back on Monday should be hitting the road before 10am. On the other hand, Waze says that you should avoid peak travel hours on Sunday between 1pm to 5pm as traffic jam reports could increase by up to 262.4% with a 199% increase in accident alerts and a 47.41% increase in hazard alerts. If you have plans to leave on Monday, the times to avoid are between 12pm to 5pm and 8pm to 10pm.
Now that seems like a pretty solid guide by a service that has more than enough data streaming in every day to form credibility. The only issue is that they did not indicate from which direction these optimal travel times apply to. Is it from the south? From the north? From the east? What about our friends over in East Malaysia and their plans to return to the city?
It seems rather unlikely that these usage situations would apply to every region of Malaysia equally well. But, Waze has noted that if you want to arrive at your destination at a certain time, you can use their app’s “Planned Drives” feature. With this, the app will alert you of the best time to leave and begin your journey back from your holidays.
Of course, if you want more awesome tips on how to survive this holiday season’s hectic travel times, our sister site TheSkop has a comprehensive holiday season survival guide that has all the info you need to have a safe and smooth journey.
