"Traffic is out of control to get there on time"
This might not work in New York, but in a city with major traffic it is easy to blame a bumper-to-bumper highway to get out of a date. It shows that you at least put in effort to "try" to get there, but there is no feasible way for you to get there on time so you are just forced to raincheck. You can text him this as you click through your Netflix queue and order Seamless, of course.
[Photo via @maddiewaterhouse]