Rush hour and the site around it: measuring how the peaks hit a location

To know how rush hour hits a site, measure the roads around it at the hours that matter to you, on several weekdays, and compare each reading with the same roads at a quiet hour. The gap between the rush-hour speed and the free-flow speed, and how often the jam factor climbs, tells you whether the site is easy to reach at opening time, whether staff will be late, and whether the morning or evening is the better trading window.

This is for operations managers, store and clinic planners, gyms, schools and anyone choosing between sites or setting opening hours. It covers what a rush hour does to a site, how to measure it, a made-up example, the common mistakes, and an AI employee that keeps measuring for you.

What rush hour does to a site

The same address can be three different places in a day:

• Hard to reach. If the roads around it crawl at 08:00, a customer who would drive 10 minutes at noon may not come before work.
• Hard to leave. A car park that empties onto a jammed road holds people in a queue, which customers remember.
• Late staff and deliveries. Morning shifts and supplier drops that start in the peak arrive late or need earlier starts.
• A better window. Some sites gain from the peak: a coffee counter on a slow inbound road, or a gym near an office quarter at 18:00.

Which of these applies depends on the roads right next to the site and the direction of the rush, not on the city's reputation for traffic.

How to measure it

Traffic Flow reads the traffic on the roads around each place at the moment the flow runs: the current speed, the free-flow speed (how fast the roads move when they are clear), the jam factor from 0 (free) to 10 (standstill), congestion as a percentage, the level in words, how many roads were measured and closed, and the busiest road. It has no car counts and no hours of its own, so you schedule it at the hours you want to see.

1. Choose the hours: the morning peak, a quiet midday hour and the evening peak, in the site's own time zone.
2. Use Schedule with Several times a day, for example 07:45, 12:30 and 18:15, on weekdays.
3. Pick the roads: Adjacent roads (about 150 m) for access to the door, Within 500 m for the approach.
4. Run it for at least two weeks. Live readings vary from day to day.
5. For each site and hour, take the average speed and congestion_pct, and count the days the level was Heavy or Standstill.

In the United Arab Emirates there is more: the Road traffic history dataset in Regional data counts the cars on the road nearest each place, hour by hour since January 2021, with their speed. Its totals include the busiest hour for cars and the slowest hour with its speed, so you can see the peak without waiting two weeks. Outside the UAE there is no car count.

A made-up example in Mexico City

Invented readings for illustration. A physiotherapy chain is choosing between two units in Mexico City for a clinic that would open at 07:00 for patients before work. It runs Traffic Flow at three hours on ten weekdays, adjacent roads only.

Invented figures for illustration; not real readings for Mexico City.

Unit A jams in both peaks, so early patients would struggle to arrive and leave. Unit B is clear in the morning and jams in the evening, which is the direction of the commute past it. For a clinic built around 07:00 appointments, Unit B fits; it should end its last slots before 17:30 or expect late patients.

Mistakes to avoid

• One morning. A single reading tells you about one day. Two weeks is a minimum.
• Only the peak. Without the midday reading you cannot tell a slow road from a congested one.
• The wrong side of the day. The morning and evening peaks often hit opposite sides of a road. Measure both.
• Weekends in the mix. Run it on weekdays only for the commute; weekends behave differently.
• Reading speed as volume. Outside the UAE you know how slow the roads are, not how many cars use them.

Let an AI employee measure it

1. Schedule: Several times a day on weekdays, at your three hours.
2. My data with the candidate sites or your branches.
3. Traffic Flow: Adjacent roads.
4. In the UAE, Regional data with Road traffic history, Totals for each place, the last 90 days.
5. A Google Sheets step that adds a row per site and reading: the time, speed_kmh, free_flow_kmh, congestion_pct, traffic_level and busiest_road.
6. Once the sheet holds two weeks, a pivot table by site and hour gives each site's average congestion and its number of heavy days. Add an Email at the end with Filter before it, keeping only Heavy or Standstill readings, so you hear about the bad mornings as they happen.

The sheet fills by itself with every reading, and the inbox only gets the readings where a site was jammed, with the busiest road named. The templates road speeds outside my depots, every hour and road speeds around the airport show the same blocks running all day.