Nobody enjoys sitting in traffic, especially during the holidays. Hesham Rakha, director for the Center for Sustainable Mobility at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, said if you are going to avoid traffic when traveling for Thanksgiving and Christmas, “you’re going to have to make some sacrifices.”

“You have to choose temporal times where people don’t want to travel,” Rakha said. “Play the devil’s advocate to think, ‘If I were to do that, these are the times that I’m going to be going,’ and then travel at a different time.”

The ideal time to travel is when everyone else has already reached their destinations. For many people (and their mothers and grandmothers), traveling on Thanksgiving or Christmas day isn’t an option.  Rakha suggests traveling earlier in the month to celebrate Christmas — like Dec. 19 or 20 — or during early morning hours as opposed to peak morning drive-times, which is usually from 6 to 9 a.m.

“You’re trying to spread out the demand over time, then that reduces the load on your transportation system,” Rakha said.

“Developing traffic management strategies is like a chess game. When you make a move, the travelers make a counter move. In Northern Virginia, they added a lane to I-66, so in response to this infrastructure enhancement travelers may wake up a little later because now there’s an extra lane so there will be less congestion. And maybe travelers that were taking Route 50 are going to now take I-66, so what happens is you get the same congestion that you had before even though you built that lane because people are going to react to the situation,” Rakha said.

Weather also needs to be a factor in your travel plans.

You may think drivers in areas that experience frequent inclement weather would travel at higher speeds and shorter headways in inclement weather given that they have experienced it many times, but Rakha’s research shows the opposite to be true. Drivers who are aware of the hazards of inclement weather are more cautious.

“I attributed the lack of driver adjustment to inclement weather to the naiveness of those drivers because drivers who were not used to the bad driving conditions were less careful,” Rakha said.

Allow for more time if roads are not dry, and if conditions turn icy, Rakha said not to risk travel.

“There is no good driver in those really bad weather conditions,” Rakha said.

About Rakha

Hesham Rakha, the Samuel Reynolds Prichard Professor of Engineering, directs the Center for Sustainable Mobility at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. Rakha was included in the Stanford University top 2 percent scientist list for 2022 and 2023. He was also named World’s Top Industry Scientist by International Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance in 2023. Rakha is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the International Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance, the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Rakha has published over 570 refereed articles and received eight conference best paper awards, two most cited article awards from the International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology, and led a team that won the IEEE ITSC 2020 UAS4T Competition. His research interests include traveler and driver behavior modeling, transportation network control, and intelligent transportations systems, to name a few.

Schedule an interview

To secure a live or recorded interview, contact Margaret Ashburn in the media relations office at mkashburn@vt.edu or 540-529-0814.

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