The commute is back

Dear reader,

Most of the subjects we’ve covered in our weekly exploration of numbers that help us understand our world are statistics, abstracted from the experiences of millions of people. But today’s topic might hit close to home for many of you: We’re looking at average commute times.

After considering the rise in motor vehicle fatalities last week, we wanted to peer at transportation in the U.S. through another window, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted commuting patterns across the world.

We’ve asked the reporter Alexander Nazaryan once again to brief us on the forces that are worsening commutes, years after the world thought they might be going away.

— Matt Thompson

How long do we spend in transit?

In the early days of the pandemic, when stay-at-home orders were in place, people gleefully shared images of empty highways in cities that were usually choked with traffic. Freeways like the notorious 405 in Los Angeles looked deserted. And the American workplace seemed to have been forever transformed. “The pandemic ended the daily commute,” Business Insider declared.

Spoiler alert: The commute is back — and it’s getting longer. People spent an average of 27.2 minutes traveling to work in 2024, up from 26.8 the year before, according to the U.S. Census Bureau as part of its American Community Survey. That’s almost the same amount of time Americans spent getting to or from work in 2019, before the pandemic. The figure is an average of all modes of commuting from the home — be it by train, subway, car, bicycle or foot.

The number has been rising since 2006, when Americans spent on average 25 minutes en route each way. The obvious exception to that steady rise was during the pandemic, when millions of people who were not designated as essential workers stayed home. But as the pandemic began to recede, employees either fully or partly began returning to the office — and got back to commuting.

Why is it taking longer to get to work?

Delivery vans: Maybe one day a drone will drop off your Amazon package. But for now, it’s mostly trucks. According to a World Economic Forum analysis from 2020, the world’s 100 biggest cities will see a 36 percent increase in delivery truck traffic by 2030, adding 11 minutes to daily commutes.
Hybrid work: About 14 million Americans are hybrid workers, a Times analysis found in 2024, meaning they go to the office only two or three days a week. That creates new travel patterns, as well as new commuter headaches, explained Chandra R. Bhat, a transportation expert at the University of Texas. Hybrid workers may live farther from their jobs and may deviate from a 9-to-5 schedule, making for unexpected rush hours. From a mobility perspective, that makes hybrid work “even worse than not having any telework at all,” Bhat said.
Really long commutes have became more common, too, because housing costs have pushed people farther into the exurbs. A 2024 report by work culture experts out of Stanford found that commutes 75 miles or longer each way had increased by 32 percent between 2019 and 2024.

How does this affect commuters?

Though commute times in the U.S. are about the same as they are in Europe, the ways that most workers travel are strikingly different. In some major Western European cities, the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy said in 2024, the share of commuters using public transportation reaches 20 percent. In the U.S., that figure is 2 percent.

And not only are Americans mostly driving, but they’re also mostly driving solo. Based on data from 2022, the U.S. Census concluded that a “majority of U.S. workers have driven alone to work every year” since at least 2005, when it began collecting the annual data.

Those long, solitary drives seem to make us less healthy and happy — not to mention less productive.

Researchers studying commuting patterns and mental health outcomes in 11 cities across Latin America found that every extra 10 minutes spent stuck in a traffic jam increased a commuter’s depression risk by .8 percent, a seemingly small rise that could increase in places where roads are becoming more congested and public transit less reliable.
A 2019 study by American researchers also revealed that longer commutes not only made workers less happy but also deteriorated their abilities as parents. Just a 1 percent increase in commuting time, the researchers discovered, based on their analysis of the Well-Being Module of the American Time Use Survey, measurably increased a driver’s stress and fatigue, as well as the sadness experienced during child-care activities. And that analysis was based on numbers from the early 2010s, when commutes were about two minutes shorter than they are today.
A Chinese study from 2022 put it bluntly: “The longer the commute, the lower the satisfaction with work and life.”

How does this differ across cities?

Washington, D.C.: According to ConsumerAffairs, Washington now has the worst commutes in the nation, at 33.4 minutes per day. Hybrid work has led to the kind of off-hours congestion Bhat described, according to The Washington Post; people who moved to the Virginia and Maryland exurbs during the pandemic are now coming in to work several days per week, clogging the Beltway.

Houston: This sprawling city with poor public transit infrastructure has experienced some of the most torrid population growth in the country. Commuters there now spend 77 hours in traffic each year. While that’s not among the highest totals in the country, it’s a record for the city, where commute times have become a regular source of complaint.
Philadelphia: Public transit has yet to recover from the pandemic in many cities. Ridership remains down. Public safety concerns linger. And in Philadelphia, the city responded to state budget cuts last year by “slashing all bus and rail service by 20 percent, eliminating 32 bus routes and reducing trips on nearly 90 existing lines,” according to WHYY, a local public radio affiliate.

So will commutes only get worse?

Not necessarily.

Congestion pricing in parts of Manhattan is reducing traffic, with some people saving as much as 15 minutes on their commutes, according to Gov. Kathy Hochul.
Dallas, Boston, Honolulu and many other cities across the country are either expanding or planning to expand commuter rail lines. Even if that doesn’t necessarily reduce commuters’ time spent in transit, trains will at least get them out of stressful traffic.

What can I check out next?

Hybrid work seems to make commutes worse for everyone. Jane Thier explores why in this 2023 article in Fortune.
In California, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, which connects San Francisco to Silicon Valley and East Bay cities like Berkeley and Oakland, is struggling to survive. As The Times recently reported, the system has been plagued by the persistence of remote work, as well as fears about crime and disorder in stations and on trains.

Can you bike to work? If you live in Davis, Calif., the answer is an emphatic yes, according to the Urban Cycling Institute.

Radhika Seth of British Vogue walked to work for a year, an experience that proved transformative. Jeremy Rellosa ran to work for a week, and wrote about it for New York magazine.

— Alexander Nazaryan

Your turn

Test your knowledge: In recent years, the gray electric Citi Bike has become popular among commuters in New York City. Riders told The Times that the bikes are both fun and fast. But perhaps too fast. Last summer, the mayor’s office ordered the bikes’ operator to reduce their top speeds by three miles per hour. What’s the limit on how fast the bikes can now go?

8 m.p.h.

Tell us your thoughts: What is your commute to work like? How has it changed since before the pandemic, if at all? Also, we’d love to know if your community has successfully made any changes to improve commutes. Please email your thoughts to [email protected].

Following up: Last week, we noted the reversal in recent years of decades of progress on reducing road fatalities. After our newsletter went out, our colleague Heather Knight reported on a trial that raised a related question: “How should a driver be punished for killing four people?”

Two years ago, a driver, then 78, crashed into a bus stop in San Francisco, killing a family of four. “She hit the gas when she thought she was hitting the brake,” said a bystander who helped the driver exit her vehicle after the crash.

Read the coverage of the trial’s emotional resolution here.

The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.

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