As predicted, traffic on Tuesday was bad. Real bad. Of course, it was not possible to predict a rolled-over tractor trailer at the most inopportune portion of the Massachusetts Turnpike, near Charlton. Due to the rollover, heavy traffic lasted from 1 pm until after midnight, instead of the expected 2 pm until 10 pm timeframe.

In addition to being data nerds, and transportation nerds we (the royal we, meaning me at least) are weather nerds. And boy, is there a poorly-timed storm a-comin’.

Traffic is never fun. On a typical weekday, backups in Boston can stretch for miles in any direction, but getting out of the city (as opposed to just around it) will lead you on to 93 to the north, or the south, or the Mass Pike going west. 93 is often the busiest highway (just try going north on a Friday afternoon in the summer, or winter, or fall …) but at holiday travel times, the Mass Pike can take the cake, devolving in to a traffic jam spanning half the state. What should take 50 minutes may take four times that long.

You may be staring at a bunch of charts here and wondering “What is this Traffic Hackers thing?” Here’s a quick history.

Traffic Hackers is a website using publicly-available real-time traffic data to analyze past traffic conditions and predict traffic conditions in the future. It began with an entry to the MassDOT Visualizing Transportation Hackathon in late 2013, and has been in development since then. We use a variety of measures to compare current traffic conditions to previous conditions and model the future. You can use Traffic Hackers to easily find current traffic conditions, look at previous average traffic for a specific date and time, and see what our model predicts for the future to plan your route, or compare travel times to alternate transportation modes.