Being stuck in traffic ruins your Christmas and you can avoid them with your iPhone

Christmas is a time when we usually travel and, even if it is short trips, a traffic jam in the middle of the road can ruin our trip. In the worst case, we will arrive late at our destination. In the “best”, you get a few minutes (or hours) of anger. Luckily, Avoiding traffic jams is easier than it seems.

If you have an iPhone, that’s enough. This alone does not prevent traffic jams on the road, but we can have applications that warn us of traffic jams that we will have on the road. Here we will talk about the three best-known options, which are also compatible with CarPlay and which we recommend always using, even if you know the route.

How to set up traffic alerts on Google Maps

We start with what is probably one of the most popular apps. Google Maps offers us the possibility of see the traffic that will be on the route upstream, but also during

. When you configure the route, you will first be able to see whether or not there will be a traffic jam, and you can always choose the fastest route to avoid it.

Furthermore, You must enable the traffic layer in the interface. Simply click on its icon (towards the top right) then on ‘Traffic’. This will allow you to see the flow of vehicles on the roads by color. Green means there is little traffic, orange means there are traffic jams and red means there are delays.

On the other hand, it’s also practical to have active notifications So, if you encounter a traffic jam once the route has started, Google Maps can offer you an alternative. It still does this by displaying it on the screen, although without voice notifications you might miss it. To do this, open the app settings, enter the “Navigation” section and make sure voice prompts are enabled.

Waze, the best road traffic information

In Waze, as in Google Maps, Traffic reports come from the community. They are the ones who report them and are usually quite efficient at this, so this is probably the best option for avoiding traffic jams.

In this case you don’t have to do anything special either, since we will get traffic information at the time we establish the route and we will also receive notifications during the journey. For him, once again it is advisable to activate voice notifications

by entering the app settings, then “Voice & Sound” and making sure the “Sounds” tab is checked “Yes”.

Apple Maps isn’t very accurate, but it also offers this data

We leave the application for the end which, at least for this, is less. However, if Apple Maps is the application that you use as GPS in the car and you do not want to use another one, know that it also offers information in this regard similar to Google Maps. In this case, you must also configure car layer in the interface, by pressing the corresponding icon at the top right then on “By car”.

In this way, a colored visual indicator identical to that of Google Maps will be displayed, the red color indicating the most congested sections. Furthermore, Other elements such as works or closed sections are also indicated.being able to obtain more information by clicking on each of them.

Now, from my own experience, I can confirm that traffic jam warnings don’t always come and when they do, they usually arrive when we are already immersed in a. Personally, I love Apple Maps’ navigation interface, but it’s clearly a weak point of the application.

In Applesfera | Apple CarPlay: what it is, how it works, what apps it includes and how to know if my car is compatible