Cape Town Airport Commute

Typical Day

The weekday median is drawn with the range from the 10th to the 90th percentile as a shaded band, and the weekend median as a dashed line.

All Readings

Every 10-minute reading from the 21 days is plotted, with each point coloured by the time of day at which it was taken.

Predictability

The bars show how much the travel time changes between consecutive 10-minute readings in each hour, so a taller bar marks an hour in which the commute is less predictable.

Week at a Glance

Each cell gives the average travel time for one hour on one day of the week, and darker cells mark longer commutes.

Day-by-Day Overlay

Each line traces a single day, with weekdays drawn in blue and weekend days as grey dashed lines.

Data Sources

The travel times are estimates from the Google Maps Routes API with traffic-aware routing, which an automated pipeline collected every 10 minutes over the 21 days from 10 to 30 March 2026; the analysis covers the hours from 03:00 to 21:00 SAST.

Data collection ran from 10 to 30 March 2026 and has since been discontinued. Everything on this page, including the charts of individual readings, is derived from that fixed three-week dataset and no longer updates.

About This Data

This page describes what the drive between the V&A Waterfront and Cape Town International Airport typically looks like at a given hour. The figures are percentiles computed from historical 10-minute readings rather than a live traffic feed, so they describe the usual pattern on the road and cannot reflect today's conditions.

All times are for the N2 highway, the safest route, on which the distance is approximately 20 km, and the two periods that most affect the journey are the morning rush into the city and the afternoon rush out of it.