Traffic is a tricky beast, especially in Los Angeles (duh), which has some of the nation's most congested freeways. There are all sorts of tools and apps that drivers use to try and avoid the gridlock, but they can't clear the way entirely, especially on a Thursday. The LA Times compared results from traffic app Waze, GPS navigation company TomTom, and the traffic analysis firm Inrix to find out the worst time to be on the roads—Thursday evenings had some of the absolute worst traffic, according to all three firms' numbers.

While the firms disagreed about which other days were terrible—in an email to Curbed about their data, Waze says that Wednesday and Thursday alternate between having the slowest times, while Inrix's numbers from earlier this year show that Friday evening's drive is just as congested as Thursday's—everyone did agree about Thursday. (Oh, cool, so everyone should just sleep at the office that night.) How bad is it? Inrix's numbers show that, on Thursdays and Fridays between 5 pm and 6 pm, an average trip takes almost 50 percent longer than it would take on a clear freeway.

Meanwhile, the worst morning commute happens on Tuesdays; on average, 9 am trips on that day "take about a third longer than they would if highways flowed freely."

And course it gets much more complicated when you look at the numbers for each of the freeways separately. Here's Inrix's data on the worst possible times by route.

· Stuck in bad traffic? Good chance it's Thursday evening [LAT]

· The Absolute Worst Times to Drive on Every Freeway in LA [Curbed LA]

· Your Commute Sucks Because More People Have Jobs Now [Curbed LA]