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How far you can get if you leave the largest U.S. cities at rush hour
- c3534l 9y agoInteresting facts and maps, but the major flaw I see is that rush hour isn't the same time in every city. And I'm not really sure why rush hour was used specifically, instead of some kind of average.
- zilian 9y agoAverage won't help you when T max matters more, for instance when you must decide where to buy an apartment. (I work on those problems)
- thatcat 9y agoMax commute distance for most people is related to rush hour traffic not the average.
- c3534l 9y agoWell, sure it is. There will be some people who make it out before or after rush hour. If you take those people into account you will get a literal average.
- dredmorbius 9y agoThe subnarrative is "if we are faced with having to evacuate large populations on short notice, what range is likely feasible". 1950s civil defence urban evacuation plans are the prior art here. http://annewhisnant.web.unc.edu/home/civil-defense-during-the-cold-war/ http://annewhisnant.web.unc.edu/home/civil-defense-during-th...
- rdtsc 9y agoHeh, DC and NY you're not getting far, doesn't matter when you leave. After being stuck on I66 or I495 even at odd hours at night I can believe it.
- robin_reala 9y ago“…by car”. Nothing about rail or other public transport sadly.
- zilian 9y agoI've had success generating similar isochrones with Navitia : http://doc.navitia.io/#isochrones http://doc.navitia.io/#isochrones
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kristopolous 9y agoDoes rail time differ dramatically where you are? For me in los angeles, the frequency of train departures can vary, but other than that, it's pretty predictable.
- manacit 9y agoIt definitely does in NYC. The distance that you can get via car is significantly less than the distance you can cover via a number of different rail systems: * Amtrak * LIRR * Metro North * NJ Transit
- ars 9y agoAre you including the time to get to your final location? Or just from rail station to rail station? Are you including wait time? Or assuming best case scenario?
- manacit 9y agoThis is either a huge straw man, or I'm not understanding what you're getting at. The original article doesn't even delve into the specifics of each city, and there is a ton of nuance when it comes to getting around in NYC (which was my original point). Depending on where you're leaving/coming from, a car can be a good option (no traffic, you live near the edge of Manhattan and get out of the borough quickly + hit little traffic once you leave) or horrible (I've taken cab rides that took nearly an hour completely inside of Manhattan). My sole point was that, in certain situations around rush hour, a train departing from Grand Central or Penn Station can probably get you at least as far, if not farther, than a car could in the same amount of time. At certain times, you can even get from Penn to Philadelphia on the Acela in about 1h15m! Consider that it's very rare that people car commute into lower Manhattan in the first place (at least, compared to the USA average of car commuting), the whole premise and investigation is a bit flawed. The majority of garages in that area don't park your car in a spot that is immediately accessible, so you could even wait 20 minutes (or call ahead) just to be able to start your car and drive away!
- monorepoman 9y agoThe analysis conflicts with personal recollection. It seems to show leaving SF at 4pm and being able to get to roughly central Mountain View in an hour. Google Maps says that if I leave today at 4pm, that trip takes "typically 1h - 1h50m" which in my experience is about right. One hour is a good outcome, not a normal one. In a car, at rush hour, sometimes it could take an hour to go four blocks down Battery Street in SF. Also, of course, the article has neglected other modes than cars. If you leave on a rush hour Acela train from Boston you'll be in Providence in 33 minutes, well outside even their 10pm driving radius for Boston.
- nostromo 9y agoSeattle also seems very... optimistic.
- stephengillie 9y agoMy anecdata confirms it - Tacoma is within 50 miles of Seattle, and 1 hour is my normal travel time - on weekends or after 7pm.
- ocb 9y agoIt seems like it's assuming that you're starting on the freeway already... totally ignoring the 30+ minutes it takes to get onto I-5
- pacaro 9y agoYeah, also it is not averaging well given geographic constraints, so the 4, 7, and 10 distances are the same(ish) for all directions except north and south and directly along i90, which makes their distribution seem oddly narrow
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- valuearb 9y agoPortland's is also misleading. Getting off the freeway still involves massive long lines to get anywhere. This is a city that just replaced the Sellwood Bridge, an aging bridge that was a huge bottle-neck because it was only a single lane both directions. They spent $324M to build a brand new Sellwood bridge that is still only a single lane both directions.
- kristopolous 9y agoThe second graphic confirms my hypothesis ... that los angeles employers have somehow staggered their hours (or given the employees more liberty) and that rush hour has become more equally distributed over a larger time range. This remediation has helped increase the number of cars commuting on the roads without significantly growing the underlying infrastructure (Washington seems to have the same pattern but I can't speak to that). You can see the middle yellow dot is about equal distance between the red and teal ones. Recently (say 2013-) when I've gotten on the freeway at about 8:30pm in Culver City (near the 10/405 heading east), I've been shocked to see it's light rush-hour style traffic (generally under 40mph + cars keeping close distance + lots of brake lights). Honestly it's about 9:30/10pm when it starts to free up. In the morning time, commute starts about 5:30 and goes to 10/10:30am and then the home commute starts up again around 2/2:30pm and goes until about 9:30pm. I have a place about 250 meters from the freeway and I can hear the pickup in the ambient freeway noise starting around 5:00 in the morning until about 5:30 where it reaches approximately its maximum background noise. People do the same "rush hour driving" at this time. There's a small distance between cars and large density of vehicles, but nobody has made a mistake to slow everyone down yet so people are doing this at a "let's beat the traffic" speed of around 80mph. It's so enormously dangerous. Take the 405 from the valley to santa monica once at this time and you'll understand why there's multiple accidents every day. This is different from when I was in high school in the 90s. I went from essentially Agoura Hills to Encino. The freeway was empty until about 6:30 and then when I was lucky enough to have a free period where I wouldn't have to show up until I think 930? I could leave at 8:30 and it would be a breeze on in. So in 20 years at least from my observation, the rush hour window maybe has increased about an hour either way.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoA combination of flex time and the perfect gas law. Individuals optimizing their commute move the time around until they can't optimize any more.
- jayd16 9y agoI feel like the modern day "This used to all orange grove" has become, "I used to be able to drive from Hollywood to Santa Monica in 20 minutes." These days you can only do that at 3am or so after the bar close traffic dies down.
- DonHopkins 9y agoDoes this have something to do with getting out of town if Trump starts a nuclear war?
- tptacek 9y agoThis was downvoted (presumably as snark) when I saw it, but I think we can reasonably assume that's the subtext behind why this piece ran today. Not because WaPo believes such a war is imminent, but because people are talking about one.
- dfc 9y agoI assumed this was just another insincere and snide comment but then I saw your name. I really don't think it has anything to do with Trump. For starters without any local Washington context giving data for 4, 7 and 10pm makes no sense if the subtext is mass evacuation. More importantly everyone loves talking about traffic in this area, congress is gone so it's a slow news month and the largest infrastructure project in the history of the area was announced yesterday, the Frederick Douglas bridge.
- tptacek 9y agoI'm not so much commenting about the likelihood of nuclear war, so much as about the empirically obvious fact that discussions of nuclear war are very much in the zeitgeist, most especially in the Washington Post.
- dfc 9y agoI didn't think your comment was motivated by the likelihood of nuclear war. Just to add another data point, this was one of two articles posted by this reporter today. The other article was about the likelihood that Reps were conducting town hall meetings in August. The reporter looks like they have a schedule of two articles published in the middle of the month and one at the end of the month.
- DINKDINK 9y ago
- gshakir 9y agoI don't how it accounts for the fact that in coastal cities like Boston, the only direction you can travel is West (SW, NW) etc. So that kinda limits the area that you can cover in an hour.
- makecheck 9y agoThere are times I've literally taken half an afternoon off to go somewhere, knowing that when I arrive I'll be sitting around for an hour and a half, because this seems better than traffic. And 99% of people never have that option. It's just gotta be a massive factor in daily stress. As a society we need to get over the ass-in-chair-9-5 mindset and allow remote work and weird hours to combat rush hour.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoSeriously improving public transit and reducing car dependency would also help a lot. (How bad is rush hour traffic in major European cities? I'm not sure.)
- s0rce 9y agoI'm guessing if you travel by car in major european (and most major cities of the world) rush hour will be similiarly bad. The main difference in European cities is that you often have better options, including better public transit or bike infrastructure, also more housing in the inner city and less endless suburbia. I don't have sources for this but my thoughts are that if traffic was much less more people would elect to use the roads and drive private cars and it would end up as congested as here, as it does when more road infrastructure is built.
- closeparen 9y agoRush hour seems just as bad on public transit: incredibly crowded trains, have to wait several trains to cram onto one, trains are stop-and-go through the tunnels because they're running too close together, etc. We need to actually reduce our transit needs (build taller buildings closer together) and spread out our commute times.
- valuearb 9y agoI usually leave around 6 pm and my average freeway velocity is 77 MPH (don't go faster because I want to avoid tickets). If I leave at 5 pm, I'll have to drive around 45 MPH for a couple miles, then back to 77 for the remaining 20 miles of my commute. This is Phoenix, which continues to build out it's freeway system and continues to falsify the "fundamental law of traffic congestion".
- jarmitage 9y agoI was interested in the same idea but based on leaving London. This led me down a rabbit hole which turned up the phrase 'time space convergence map', which is an interesting way to cartographically project this feature: (see image half way down on the right) http://geographylaunchpad.weebly.com/the-friction-of-distance.html http://geographylaunchpad.weebly.com/the-friction-of-distanc...
- zilian 9y agoI think you should investigate "isochrones"
- emilyfm 9y agoAn interesting one for London is Train Times vs House Prices [1]. Shows how prices are affected by commute times (and the raw data is downloadable if you want to plot the times on a map). [1] http://anna.ps/blog/train-times-v-house-prices-graphing-the-commuter-belt http://anna.ps/blog/train-times-v-house-prices-graphing-the-...
- dredmorbius 9y agoSpace v. time is one dimension, but energy costs and infrastructure requirements are other critical elements. A passenger car and a long-haul airliner are about equivalently efficient, on a fuel-per-passenger-mile basis (assuming a high load factor for the aircraft, and a single occupant for the auto). Rail is far more efficient, and time-competitive with air for modest to fair long trips (given high-speed rail). Shipping is the most efficient form of transport by far, but also one of the slowest. Automobiles require roads of some description, though they can flexibly shift routes across these. Aircraft and ships require ports, though have freedom of movement exclusive of these (with some choke-points: straights and canals, mostly, for ships). Rail is almost the equivalent of "ships on land", though the right-of-way itself is required. The requirements for these are comparatively modest for basic service, though high-speed and high-capacity routes, and switching, increase requirements. It's an interesting field.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoFlying commercial is about 43% more efficient than driving. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2014/07/driving_vs_flying_which_is_more_harmful_to_the_environment.html http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2014/07/dri...
- DIVx0 9y agoI used to live in an exurb of Minneapolis (25 miles) and had to commute to/from the city. I'm sorry to say that at least for Minneapolis this map is wildly inaccurate. My 25 mile commute would take me, not accounting for unusual weather, at best 1 hour and at worst 2 hours. I wish I could live in whatever fantasy world they pulled the data from.
- Pulcinella 9y agoSame for Dallas. My Friday home commute takes 45 min to an hour at 4 pm. It's only 9 miles.
- Rapzid 9y agoI find it hard to believe one could get into the west side of FW from downtown Dallas in one hour during rush hour.. It's been 8 years since I lived/worked there, but I can't imagine traffic has gotten better.
- killbrad 9y agoWhy not just bike it?
- teach 9y agoSure, if you want to get hit by a car and breathe in tremendous amounts of carbon monoxide. Most roads in Texas cities are extremely unfriendly for bike traffic.
- littleweep 9y agoMarfa is pretty bike friendly ;)
- ams6110 9y agoNot to mention arriving at work looking like a wet dishrag. Texas is pretty hot.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
- jimktrains2 9y agoYou can sit on 376, especially through the bathtub, for a good 30' at rush hour in Pittsburgh. I'm not sure I believe that map.
- JaggerFoo 9y agoI think Thursday is a busier traffic day than Friday, here in Los Angeles. There is a term that traffic reporters use in Los Angeles - "Friday Light" traffic. I wonder if "Friday Light" occurs in the other cities mentioned in the report. That being said leaving at 7pm is a valid strategy any day of the week here in Los Angeles. Great reporting.
- uiri 9y agoAnecdotally, I think that traffic from San Francisco to Mountain View on Friday mornings is lighter. I attributed it to people working from home on Fridays while going into the office the other 4 days of the week.
- madcaptenor 9y agoIn Atlanta we have light traffic on Friday mornings but heavy traffic on Friday evening. My theory is that morning traffic is almost entirely people going to work, of whom there are slightly fewer on Fridays, but evening traffic is both people coming home from work and people going out for fun. The extra fun trips on Friday evening more than make up for the people not working on Friday.
- 0xffff2 9y agoMy experience in the bay area has been that people overwhelmingly leave the area on the weekends. Any freeway that leads away from SF tends to be at a standstill by 3PM every Friday.
- aweiland 9y agoThat pattern happens in the DC area, especially in the summer.
- seandougall 9y agoI'd be curious to see a comparison of weekdays vs weekends. My experience living in the Bay Area was that driving through the east bay was way worse on Sundays, while it's far better than weekday traffic in L.A., where I live now.
- mikeash 9y agoWith all the fuss over North Korea recently, I was expecting a completely different sort of article for this headline.
- zjaffee 9y agoIt's interesting, because in LA, while downtown traffic is bad, the most horrendous areas are west of downtown, where if you start in Santa Monica let's say, traveling more than 10 miles in an hour is difficult during peak return traffic.
- mrbill 9y agoI live in Houston. My commute home (from up on North Loop West, to near Gessner/Westheimer) takes a minimum of 30 minutes even if I leave at 6-6:30pm. Total distance? ~11 miles. Here's the data from my Automatic Pro GPS OBD2 dongle, on a "good day": Trip started August 10, 2017 at 06:20PM Trip ended August 10, 2017 at 06:58PM
- j4kp07 9y agoWorld's largest highway system (28 lanes at some points), yet still the second most congested.
- mrbill 9y agoThat 28-lane part (BW8/I10 intersection and around it) is just 2-3 miles from my house.. fortunately my commute doesn't go anywhere near it (in the other direction, actually). I do have to deal with the 59/610 interchange, which they're getting ready to re-do in the next few years.. the detour/re-route for that project is going to cause hell for quite a lot of people.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoOne of the interesting things here for me is building market rate housing in the "south bay" region of the Bay Area. Current residents are up in arms about all the 'high rise apartments and condos' being built because they worry about the traffic, but don't consider that Apple alone is dropping 21,000 employees into the area, if they can live close to work you get less traffic. It's a very nimbyish dynamic.
- s0rce 9y agoYes, its clearly not about traffic as every office building has an enormous number of car trips, maybe a bit less than homes but not by much I'm guessing, and they are clustered at rush hour.
- lostlogin 9y agoResidents just need to push for a faster OS update cycle. Continual crunch time will mean less traffic as employers won't be leaving the office.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- viridian 9y agoAt this point SF home owners are the largest collective example of NIMBY types in history, but it also makes sense, since it's a group that tends to have the majority of their net worth tied to their own property.
- agentgt 9y agoNew England looks pretty bad in this article but I beg to differ albeit I am biased. I live around Boston and while I agree I will say that Boston like the rest of New England is extremely seasonal and even then it's week by week and based on weather. I'm typing this while on my iPhone after just traveling to Cape Cod this Friday evening and it only took 1.25 hours and left at 4pm. I hope to make two points: 1. you can see hell of lot more interesting things in 5 hours or less from Boston than almost any other city in the Midwest or even California. 2. Boston is extremely high variance particularly because it is a college town and has "4 seasons". If you know what you are doing you can use this to your advantage.
- notreallythough 9y agoNot sure what point you're trying to make — I live in Boston and the map seems generally accurate. Sometimes it takes longer, sometimes shorter — that's why we use averages. There's also a reason traffic to the cape is high during the summer months — the cape sucks in the winter. Not sure how you're using that to your advantage.
- agentgt 9y ago> Not sure what point you're trying to make — I live in Boston and the map seems generally accurate. Sometimes it takes longer, sometimes shorter — that's why we use averages. Yes the map is correct! I'm saying what most people probably missed is that New England is highly compressed and has many factors such as complicated roads and seasons. However because its compressed you do not need to travel 5 hours! Five hours gets you past NYC even with traffic. > There's also a reason traffic to the cape is high during the summer months — the cape sucks in the winter. Not sure how you're using that to your advantage. No its exactly as the article points out that timing is big deal and I was saying its even more of a big deal seasonal. I said I left at 4 pm. to the Cape Not 5 pm. That is a big deal for Boston as the article clearly shows. In other cities it is not. In other cities such as Atlanta for example you still have to drive 4 hours to get Savannah. However cursory look of the article makes it appear cities like Atlanta are great commuting cities because of how far you can drive regardless of the time.
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- syntaxing 9y agoI drove near the country side of Illinois yesterday. Traveling 65 miles took a little over an hour. I drove 30 miles today near the Greater New York area and it took almost two hours... The traffic here is infuriating.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoFirst world problems. Beijing has worse traffif than any of these cities, and if you try to get out on a holiday, it could take you the whole day just to exit the city. If they do construction on the highway in and out, multi day traffic jams are possible, the longest one being 8 days (mostly for trucks, though).
- HumbleGamer 9y agoI live in Daly City/SF. I dont even attempt to go to the East Bay until 8:30-9:00pm through the week. Guaranteed hour of traffic just to get out of SF, at least 35-45 minutes to reach the Bay bridge in high congestion.
- eagsalazar2 9y agoWhy did they pick 4pm? In Seattle, for example, leaving at 4pm frequently means you miss heavy traffic all together while leaving at 5pm is almost a guarantee of gridlock the second you get on the freeway. If you leave at 4pm and head due east on 90, most likely you'll be in eastern washington by 5pm and won't hit any traffic at all. In SF it is more complicated because there are big traffic problems in almost every direction so if you leave at 4pm and are still driving somewhere at 5pm, then you'll get stuck in traffic. Still 4pm seems like an odd time to pick.
- kbrosnan 9y agoSummer Fridays tend to have an earlier rush hour than other days of the week and other times of the year. People try to get a jump start on their weekend.
- Trickilozis 9y agoThe map is a little misleading, only in the sense that people care a ton about the difference from 0-1 hour, but no one commutes 5 hours. So we get a map that gives a ton visual weight to "commutes" more than two hours. I know I'm the one making this about commutes, but they are concerned with rush hour, so I don't feel like I'm out of bounds. The fact that all the cities look the same speaks to this fact. The only restriction seems to be geography/geology.