These are the 5 Google Maps tricks I always recommend to avoid traffic jams on vacation

We are at the gates of some of the busiest traffic days in Spain. August is the month par excellence for vacations in our country. So much so that many companies close for a few weeks (although there are winds of change) and force workers to take their days off in this month. Not to mention of course the school calendar, which puts the biggest vacations in the summer period in all autonomous communities. This causes many to go on trips at the same time, which causes traffic jams on the roads.

Check which day is worse. Usually the 1st, 15th and 30th are the worst days to undertake a trip because the amount of people moving at the same time is higher. That is why there are so many reports of traffic jams in cities like Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona or Seville, among others, some at the exits and others at the entrances. It is clear that when the road network has to support a greater number of vehicles, congestion is inevitable.

However, there are ways to scale a bit that influx of cars and, if we want to avoid traffic jams, you can use applications such as Google Maps, which have some integrated tools to know how is the state of traffic in real time, how to calculate alternative routes that are longer but in these occasions also faster, and so on. Traveling without a cell phone and a mapping application is no longer normal. In fact, many car buyers appreciate that vehicles have systems such as Apple CarPlay or Android Auto and that is largely the fault of applications such as Waze or Google Maps.

Calculate departure time. Thanks to the huge database that Google Maps has, the application is able to predict, with some accuracy, the traffic that will be in a place depending on the time and day in question. It is not the same to look at a Monday at 8 pm as on a Friday at 3 pm. Thanks to this information, it is possible to calculate whether it is worthwhile to leave a little earlier or even a little later.

There is no point in leaving two hours earlier for your vacation destination if you are going to be stuck in a traffic jam for two extra hours. To check what time is the best time to leave and to know how much time we will need to travel it is necessary to select the starting point and destination in the normal way and then click on the icon of the three dots in the upper right corner to click on Define departure or arrival time.

There we have to put the departure time that we calculate and see what route time it gives us. Then we can change that departure time to another one and check if it is better or worse than the first one. In this way we can calculate the best options a few days in advance. The accuracy is not total, but it is worth spending a few minutes on it. It is also worth checking the traffic early the next day. That will lose us a little time at our destination, but sometimes it also saves us many hours of waiting on the road.

Check traffic before you leave. Of course, one of the must-use features when you are about to start a trip is to check the traffic on the route you have to take. To do this, open Google Maps and click on the overlay icon on the right side of the map.

That’s where the different layers of information are activated, among which is the traffic. If activated we will see how the main roads and roads are colored in three shades: green, yellow and red. This gradient is the one that indicates the amount of traffic there is, to see if it is better to take a detour to get to a place even if it is by a longer route, as it could still be faster. These colors vary depending on the day and time of day.

See alternative routes. The application itself allows us to calculate alternative routes when we establish a trip between two points. In the interface it indicates the time of each of these routes and, if we want, we can click on each one to get more data.

When we have selected one of them you can open the bottom drop-down menu, which has a section that shows the traffic on that route, so you can quickly compare it with other routes that you have proposed to us. These routes can be customized to avoid tolls, or highways, or ferries.

Real-time routes. One of the advantages of Google Maps not being an offline application is that it is permanently connected to the Internet and obtains data in real time. If we are following one of the routes that has marked us but there is a hold ahead, which was not there when we started the trip, it is possible that the application itself recalculates the route and sends us somewhere else.

For this it is important to have the application open in the foreground, either in Android Auto, Android Automotive or the mobile itself, depending on the car we have. The calculation of new routes is automatic and you do not have to do anything to activate it.