How to find the best time to travel by road

Storm timing is the whole game on a long drive. The same road, driven four hours later, can be a different trip. Finding the best time to travel is a matter of moving your departure and watching what happens to the weather along the way.

Move the start time and watch the route recalculate

Your departure time decides when you reach each point, and the forecast shown at each point is the one valid at that moment. Move the departure and every arrival moves with it. This is the only way to find out whether leaving later gets you past the weather rather than through it.

Watch the weather slide off your miles

Rain, wind and low visibility sit at particular places at particular hours. Sliding the departure forward or back moves those places relative to your route, and you can see exactly when the bad weather clears a stretch. Often it moves out of your way entirely.

Count the daylight

Departure time also decides how much of the trip is in daylight and how much is at night. Check the split of day and night driving, and where sunrise and sunset fall on the route. An hour of delay can turn a daylight crossing into a night drive over unfamiliar road, with the temperature on the way down.

Early starts have their own weather

A very early departure avoids traffic but can run straight into the common dawn fog, which forms on clear still nights and is thickest before sunrise. It usually clears within a couple of hours of sunrise, so a slightly later start can be the better one. See driving in fog.

Depart at, or arrive by

Sometimes the fixed point is the arrival, not the departure. Plan by arrival time when you have to be somewhere at a set hour, and see what time you have to leave to do it and what weather you meet on the way.

Plan ahead, then check again

You can plan up to 10 days ahead. Plan early so you have options, then recheck the evening before: the closer the day, the more precise the hour.

When timing is not enough

If no departure time helps, the answer is a different road. See how to find the best route for a road trip, or put the two together in how to plan a road trip around the weather.