Beating The Raya Gridlock: Insights From 2024’s Traffic Heatmap
FYI, the main PLUS highways are expecting more than two million vehicles this Raya season.
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It’s that time of the year again. The balik kampung exodus is about to kick off, and with it, the traffic nightmare that is simply inevitable.
Depending on where your hometown is, what days you applied for work leave, and whether you even have a kampung to go back to that is outstation (looking at you, Kuala Lumpur locals), you might have a chance of skipping the highway gridlocks altogether, or be doomed to sit in it for an inhuman number of hours.
But what if there is a collection of data that could possibly help you find the perfect time to get on the road and reach your family home without crawling through the festive season traffic jam?
Twitter user shares visual of 2024 Hari Raya traffic
Thevesh, whose X (formerly Twitter) bio says he “Mostly tweets data about Malaysia” recently shared a heatmap, which is a form of chart or graph, that illustrates the traffic intensity by date and hour during the 2024 Raya season.
As a reminder and for context, Hari Raya 2024 fell on 10 April, which was a Wednesday.
He gave several of his own observations on the heatmap, which is actually incredibly insightful. Read on to see what he deduced from the chart:
- 2am to 3am is the sweet spot to balik kampung, no matter what day.
- The balik kampung traffic is not as bad as returning to work traffic as people go in batches but return to the city in bulk.
- Two “groups” were clearly visible, suggesting that some people returned home on Friday (5 April 2024), while others waited until Monday (8 April 2024).
- A spike in traffic occured on the second day of Raya, which Thevesh suspects it’s people with two kampungs travelling from one to the other.
- Traffic was particularly bad on Sunday (14 April 2024). Thevesh thinks this implies that people maxed out their leaves.
Thevesh also pointed out the patterns of regular work traffic before and after the Raya holidays, noting a steep dropoff of traffic on 3 and 4 April, 2024, after 7pm as people get ready to break fast.
READ MORE: Raya Rush: JPJ Steps Up Bus Inspections, Car Service Requests Surge
The heatmap was created after validating Khairul Aming’s Raya traffic forecast
Celebrity chef and influencer Khairul Aming publishes a poll every year to help predict Raya traffic by getting participants to mark the date they are planning to drive back to their hometowns, and a separate poll for when they’re driving back to the city.
According to Thevesh, Khairul’s forecasts are pretty accurate when compared to data he got from running a live traffic bot through Google Maps API (some coding jargon) last year.
My thread earlier was focused on validating @khairulaming's survey, but actually this heatmap deserves a tweet all for itself.
— Thevesh (@Thevesh) March 22, 2025
There is SO MUCH detail contained within it, it's just beautiful 😍
Observations on Raya traffic:
• 2-3am is the sweet spot to leave, no matter which… https://t.co/ddg4g6xFUW pic.twitter.com/tQhnKHkrTg
However, Thevesh did note in a comment that his data was not specific to each state or area, and that the data was only based on what he collected from highways. He said he lacked access to more detailed data with latitude and longitude and can’t aggregate it by location.
As an example, he said he couldn’t distinguish between the stretch of the PLUS highway in Kedah and the stretch in Perak.
Goodhart’s Law
Another interesting thing Thevesh pointed out (well, his girlfriend highlighted it actually) was a theory behind the difference between Khairul’s survey and what he derived from Google Maps.
It seems that due to Khairul’s survey being done very early, people changed their travel dates after seeing the survey results.
Thevesh explained this phenomenon called Goodhart’s Law, which occurs when you publish a forecast of what will happen, that forecast can cause people to change their actions and therefore make your original forecast less accurate.
So when is the best time to balik kampung for Raya?
Seeing as how Raya last year was in the middle of the week, this year is a bit different as Raya is expected on Monday (31 March).
If you’re a take-a-long-AL person, you probably would have already left today or plan to leave tomorrow (28 March). On the other hand, if you’re a last minute traveller, then Sunday would be your journey back home.
Considering the possibility that many people would leave on Friday after work, perhaps Saturday would be an ideal day to make your way back to your hometowns.
But remember Goodhart’s Law. Some people might have the same idea and make the trip on the same day as you do!
In any case, be sure to drive safely and abide by traffic rules. Also, be respectful to other road users and your journey home should be smooth sailing, traffic jam or not.
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