NY Thanksgiving Travel Traffic 2019: Best, Worst Times To Drive

Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and planning the logistics of your holiday travel can be a stressful affair. The same question seems to emerge every year: When is the best time to hit the road in New York?

Google Maps has identified the best and worst times to leave for your Thanksgiving road trip, helping you focus on enjoying family fun and chowing-the-turkey time.

Here are the times you need to know for turkey day-related travel in New York.

• Best Time To Leave Before Thanksgiving: 6 a.m. Thanksgiving
• Worst Time To Leave Before Thanksgiving: 3 p.m. Wednesday
• Best Time To Leave After Thanksgiving: 6 a.m. Sunday
• Worst Time To Leave After Thanksgiving: 3 p.m. Sunday

Those times assume you want to leave during the daytime hours. If that doesn’t matter to you, the best time to leave before Thanksgiving is 2 a.m. Wednesday; the best time after Thanksgiving is 3 a.m. Friday.

Traffic on Black Friday in New York will spike around 3 p.m.

Google Maps also used aggregated and anonymized popular time data during the Thanksgiving week to identify when crowds tend to be the largest at popular holiday venues.

Bakeries, grocery stores and liquor stores all hit peak crowd levels between noon and midnight on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Movie theaters and shopping centers, though, have the most activity between noon and midnight on Black Friday.

To determine the best and worst times to drive on Thanksgiving, Google Maps analyzed data from the 2018 “Thanksgiving Holiday Period,” which included the Wednesday before Thanksgiving until the end of Sunday after the holiday.

The web mapping service found the volume of cars on the road at a given time during this period, and received the traffic information anonymously from Android users in 25 cities throughout the United States.

And from all of us here at Patch, have a happy Thanksgiving!