We’ve all been there. You have to be somewhere really early in the morning. Maybe its a flight. Maybe it’s a meeting. And you decide to splurge for a taxi or car.

But how much time should you budget to avoid traffic? Can you beat traffic if you leave early enough?

I’ve always wondered when rush hour really is in NYC. So I turned to TLC taxi trip data to help answer the question. And thanks to Chris Whong’s FOIL request, we now have access to that data from 2013.

My first finding was that the average trip speed for the 172 million trips from 2013 was a whopping 13.3mph.

Next, for each minute of the day that a metered trip starts, I calculated the average speed for those trips. The results are below:

We learn a few things from the chart. First, there does not seem to be a rush hour in NYC. It’s just a “rush day”! From 8AM to about 7PM, cars (or at least taxis with passengers) are going about the same speed more or less: 11.5 mph on average.

After 7PM, things get slowly better over time until it peaks after 5AM. The actual peak, or the time with the least traffic on the road in NYC is at 5:18AM. The average trip speed at that time is 24mph or about 1.8 times faster than the average NYC taxi trip! But as soon as 5:18AM hits, things start going the wrong way fast. For every 15 minutes you wait after that time to start your trip, the average speed drops by about 1 mph.

One other thing to note: the slowest time for cabs clocks in at 12:17PM, where trips took an average of 11.1 mph. So go ahead and skip that cab to lunch.

Editors Note: Unlike most of the data sets I look at, this data is not truly open yet. I continue to ask the TLC to release this data properly. FOIL != Open.

-In response to the inevitable complaint about this: I realize this is just an approximation for traffic. Taxi’s are very Manhattan-centric, and so it’s not really evenly distributed throughout NYC. But it’s an interesting proxy to me nonetheless.

-Analysis done with Google Big Query (thanks Jason Hall for BigQuery'ing it).

-2013 data FOILed from TLC by Chris Whong. (I wish this was real Open Data, but maybe one day it will be).

-Chart created in Excel.

-Special thanks to various reddit users for giving me Biq Query examples to work off of.