You're not getting live traffic without something uploading your locations to a central server. That's how they know traffic in the first place.

I know people who work on Google Maps, and I can say they take privacy seriously. If you opt out of location history then they're really not tracking you in any meaningful way. However, using it is still supporting a monopolistic corporation that provides a free map product to prevent other corporations from profiting on map products, because maps lead to local data which could be a meaningful competitor to their search monopoly.