Palermo (gro) Anyone traveling by car in Palermo should avoid rush hour at all costs. In no other city in Italy do drivers spend as much time in traffic jams as in the Sicilian capital, an average of 40 percent of the driving time per year, as determined for the international Tom Tom Traffic Index . Palermo is followed by Rome with 36 and Milan with 25 percent congestion. These are also top European figures. Drivers spend more driving time in congested traffic than in Palermo only in Moscow (congestion share 65 percent), Istanbul (57 percent) and Warsaw (44 percent congestion share).
Free travel later in the morning, after 1 p.m. and after 8 p.m.
As a vacationer, you can easily avoid the Palermo bumper-to-bumper traffic by staying on the roads between 8:30 and 11:30 am, as well as in the afternoon between 1:30 pm to 6 pm and again only after 8 pm . This applies primarily to those who travel with their own car. However, it is also recommended for walking explorations of the city, for trips with the city buses and the inner-city S-Bahn. Also for trips with horse-drawn carriages you should choose the low-traffic times.
It’s always breezy along the harbor promenade.
Thanks to its splendid location on an elongated bay, it’s almost always pleasantly breezy along the kilometer-long harbor promenade, even during peak traffic hours, all the more so because there, at the Foro Italico, large pedestrian zones have been set up with palm gardens and picturesque seating areas that extend to the water’s edge of the harbor basin. From there you can watch at leisure the giant ships that arrive and depart throughout the day until late at night.