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Smart cities have been widely investigated, and several algorithms, techniques, and protocols have recently been developed to serve smart city environments. Intelligent traffic management is one of the main research fields in this area. It aims to control and monitor the traffic over downtown and highway scenarios. The real-time traffic characteristics on road networks highly affect safety conditions and driving behaviors. Detecting hazardous traffic conditions and congested areas early helps drivers make the best decision to avoid dangerous situations. After extensive training, machine learning algorithms are mainly used for prediction in this field. In the intelligent traffic control target, trained machines are beneficial in obtaining instant and accurate predictions regarding traffic congestion levels and their distributions. Several parameters control the efficiency of the selected machines. This includes the dataset quality, the regression algorithm's parameters, and how they have been tuned. In this work, we first create high-quality datasets representing the moving vehicles for different main roads in various countries, including Bank St in Canada, North Rodeo Drive (NRD) in Los Angeles, USA, Queen Rania Al Abdullah (QRA) road in Jordan, and Sheikh Zayed Road (SZR) in Saudi Arabia. Then, we test the most popular regression algorithms and evaluate their performance in terms of temporal prediction of traffic characteristics and traffic congestion in different geographical road scenarios. We optimized these regression algorithms and tuned the used parameters using the grid search approach. After that, more advanced metaheuristic optimization algorithms were used to improve the prediction accuracy of the selected machine. Experimentally, we have proved the enhancements in predicting traffic characteristics for the tested road scenarios. Both approaches show enhanced results compared to using the regression algorithm without tuning the parameters. It shows advanced results for both approaches for the coefficient of determination measure, named R squared (R 2), with approximately 0.07, 0.04, and 0.08 enhanced values for Bank St., NRD, and SZR roads, respectively. In contrast, it shows approximately 0.95, 0.49, and 3.62 enhanced values for Bank St., NRD, and SZR roads, respectively, for the Root Mean Squared Error (R M S E) measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]