Very easy choice: don’t drive. If it’s a weekday you’ll get into traffic jams no matter when or how you drive. Besides traffic jams, parking in Ghent has become expensive in an attempt to keep cars outside of the city center. Ghent also introduced something that is called ‘circulation plan’ to limit and steer car traffic, which makes driving in the city center challenging.

There is a train about every 15 minutes between Brussels and Ghent (every 25 min during the weekend) and if you start at Brussel-Midi (Brussels south station) Ghent is the next stop when on an intercity train. It’s only a 30min drive.
Ghent itself has trams driving through the city so you can use those to get around.