How far you can get if you leave the largest U.S. cities at rush hour | Hacker News Reader

How far you can get if you leave the largest U.S. cities at rush hour

washingtonpost.com

273 pointsmcone132 comments

The 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.

A combination of flex time and the perfect gas law. Individuals optimizing their commute move the time around until they can't optimize any more.

I 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.

> The 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.

That could be it. I left the Los Angeles area in 1988, so have no idea what is going on now, but just going by my memory of what it was like when I lived there I'd have guessed a different explanation.

That would be that at 4 PM you are limited by the traffic from people going home from work. By 7 PM that's largely gone, but now you are running into all the people who going out for the evening to eat, attend concerts and movies and sporting events, do evening shopping, and so on. In Los Angeles, those kind of excursions usually involved a freeway trip.

Something that I think they missed (or else I missed) is that going from downtown LA westbound in the evening rush hour isn't the worst one - it's going east from the west side. Living west and working east is practically reverse-commuting on the 10.

The west side in particular is basically the land of "rush hour never ends" to an unbelievable extent compared to my experiences in the Bay Area, Seattle, Atlanta, and Austin (all which have plenty of people stuck with terrible commutes) - it's just a different magnitude of practically-never-ending-pain on every possible route.

A big part of this is that the 405 acts as a giant nearly impenetrable wall separating the west side from everywhere else. The few underpasses that exist (Ohio, etc) become horrific logjams every day. I've spent 45 min going 1/4 mile to get past the 405.

Holy crap. I'd get a motorcycle and lane split if I were you. Have a friend out in LA that does this. It cut down on his commute time significantly.

My parents moved from the Valley back to Beverly Hills when I was in college, so when I'd be back for break I would go between the Westside and the Valley a lot to see my HS friends. My mom would tell me that I should avoid trying to go between the two between 2 and _8_. LA traffic really is absurd.

That could just be due to people driving longer distance. They just have to start earlier or finish later.

Confirming your DC suspicion. Quite a few jobs like construction and manufacturing are on a 6-2 or 6-6 schedule depending on their hours.

In DC, the Pentagon is both a huge employer and centrally located at a number of crossroads. They specifically do have staggered schedules to combat rush hour, and some of their parking lots even have their own exists off of the highway.

The 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.

Seattle also seems very... optimistic.

My anecdata confirms it - Tacoma is within 50 miles of Seattle, and 1 hour is my normal travel time - on weekends or after 7pm.

It 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

Yeah, 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

Portland'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.

From what I heard, the old bridge was pretty much falling apart (it had temporary girder braces and such), so it seemed like it needed to be replaced. Oregon in general has lots of aged bridges in need of repair or replacement.

Regarding Sellwood, I have heard that the new bike lanes on the bridge are an improvement. That is just second hand information though -- I don't ride on it.

The bike and pedestrian improvements are huge. The old bridge had no shoulders (death trap to ride) and one ~3' sidewalk on the North side that was shared between pedestrians and bikes heading West and East.

Edit to add photo...

You can see the old span alongside the new bridge here:

http://www.sellwoodbridge.org/files/12-15-15.jpg

What's all the space in the middle for?

You're seeing both the old span (moved North from its original location) and the new bridge under construction in that photo. Once the new bridge was finished, the old span was torn down.

More photos here:

http://www.sellwoodbridge.org/?e=518

The bike/ped improvements haven't done anything for the massive traffic jam the bridge causes. Even at non peak hours, such as 2pm in the afternoon there can be a quarter mile of cars lined up waiting to get on it from the west side.

Tacoma street East of the bridge wasn't gonna get any wider no matter how many lanes wide they made the bridge (which is mostly one lane each way). It would make no sense to widen the bridge beyond the width of Tacoma.

The road to the east of the bridge narrows to one lane each direction for 100 yards, then returns to two lanes wide. And there is clearly room to make that hundred yards two lanes wide.

And worse, eventually PDX is going to wake up and realize they need to widen key surface streets to address their traffic hell. That will be expensive enough on it's own. But after you already blew $300M on a bridge to ensure it will always be the bottle-neck, it will be far more expensive.

And then returns to two lanes, rinse, repeat. Not sure how you think widening Tacoma would happen. You'd need to tear down most houses and businesses that line the street. I live in Sellwood, trust me, the bridge is not the bottleneck.

I've driven over it many times, it's clearly a bottle neck. And read my post again, the worst part is they spent hundreds of million on a bridge that will become THE bottleneck if they ever try to improve traffic flow in Sellwood itself.

Nashville as well.

Agreed.

One stopped car on the shoulder, a cop handing out tickets, or worse a 'standard' accident or stopped car...

There are many ways to double the commute time.

Acela isn't exactly great comparatively as it's not an economically viable daily commute option. I don't know what it is for Boston to Providence, but DC to Baltimore is $40 one way in 25-30mins. Compared to 15-20 mins more for the commuter train at $7 one way, it hardly seems worth it.

$7 one way?! I guess Chicago's spoiled me at $2.25.

$2.25 on Metra or the L?

The El, not the Metra. Chicago is lucky with transit options. On Amtrak you could get from Chicago to Grand Rapids, MI in 4 hours.

I don't know if anyone will care, but I saw Grand Rapids, MI mentioned so I thought I'd throw my 2 cents in. I like taking Amtrak to Chicago from Battle Creek, MI. Usually about 3 hours, and that's my preferred way to go to Chicago for the weekend or longer.

Day trips are more interesting because of the South Shore Line.

http://www.mysouthshoreline.com/tickets/maps-stations

It's a electric rail that runs from South Bend, IN to Millennium Station in Chicago. Take something like a Cubs game. I drive 2 hours to the Dune Park station

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Marshall,+Michigan+49068/Dun...

From there I park for free and ride the train to Chicago and then hop the Red Line to Wrigley. Even if it's a night game I can still make it back to Millennium Station for the last train out at 12:45AM.

The South Shore Line is also great for conventions on the weekend because it stops right at McCormick Place.

Metra won't cost that past clyborn

Clybourn

Autocorrect failed me.

I have a feeling that Chicago will switch to a distance based tap on/off system at some point. It just makes more sense to understand where people are actually using the system, and also prevents train dwellers riding nonstop all day.

The Metra is based on the distance that you go (well the zones).

    I don't know what it is for Boston to Providence

$29, one way, 33min. Northeast Regional is $12 for 40min, MBTA is $11.50 for 63min.

Acela is really priced for expense accounts. Given that the entire Boston-NYC route was electrified for Acela anyway, it rarely makes sense for me as an individual to pay for Acela vs. the Regional. It saves maybe an hour and gives you a slightly more comfortable car but it's 2x the price.

I rarely take it but MBTA commuter rail has really gotten pricey. There are passes but I'm almost $30/day to commute into Boston by train between parking, the ticket, and the subway on the other end.

I commute by car from Sunnyvale, CA to SF (Harrison/8th) almost every day, and I'm flexible with when I can drive there, so I started to track google maps time to find the better time.

the pattern repeats almost every day: https://monosnap.com/file/jHAuLrr1JqOxM6lSNN8H0DGFSoCcJb

1st wave starts at 5am and at the top of it at 8am then it's getting better. there's a spot between 10:30 and noon when you can drive within 40 to 50 minutes, then it's getting worse (2nd wave). if you would decide to drive at 5pm it would take almost 1.5 hours to drive to Sunnyvale

the best time to drive from SF to the Valley is after 8pm, there is a small increase in between 10pm and midnight - roadworks while traffic is still present.

it's interesting that the pattern is accurate up to the minute, it's 10:30, not 10:15 or 10:45 when there's a spot to drive, almost every day

From the article:

"Using billions of anonymous measurements from cell phones and vehicle sensors, Here Technologies, a location platform company, calculates how traffic conditions change throughout the day"

Emphasis on the word "billions". I find my own can be quite variable too. Large sample sizes should make that number more predictable.

More predictable does not imply more consistent. It just means you can nail down numbers like 10th and 90th percentile more easily. They'll still be far apart in many areas.

I'm not sure how you could understand statistics and make that statement. It's contradictory on the face of it.

Agreed. It shows a far more optimistic view of how far one can get in 1 hour at 4pm in Atlanta, however my wife would consistently spend nearly 2 hours in traffic to travel 21.4 miles. Without traffic that is normally a 30 minute drive.

The 4pm travel time also changes based on day, afair. I used to make the commute from SF to Menlo Park every day, and Tue, Wed, Thurs were much worse than Mon or Fri.

One 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.

Yes, 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.

Residents 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.

At 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.

Does this have something to do with getting out of town if Trump starts a nuclear war?

This 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.

I 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.

I'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.

I 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.

Traffic dynamics of rush our traffic != traffic dynamics because people think their city is about to be nuked.

I'd posit some from WaPo would welcome Trump starting a nuclear war just so they can claim "See, we were right finally, we told you so!"

I'll always remember election night when after much confusion and sadness, MSNBC found somewhere a stock market chart from Japan or maybe after-hours trading showing the market was headed down. They printed it out to make it look official, the mood lifted and they excitedly talked about how Trump will blow away everyone's 401k accounts and people will be starving during their retirement. Of course stock market bounced back up next day and was doing ok since. But what was interesting is how excited and happy they were talking about retirement accounts going up in flames just as long as it fit the story they have been supporting and building up.

Very much this, yes.

Note that the URL reveals the title "escape time".

And, in such circumstances, your best bet is to drive west. Barring that, either north or south. East will generally be downwind.

Of course, there are areas in which westward road travel is somewhat limited.

(I was going to make a similar comment, found yours.)

> And, in such circumstances, your best bet is to drive west.

Hmm. Given that public transit stations are deep below the earth, and many huge buildings have deep underground space: would it be more effective to wait 8h underground and then try to escape over the fallout-laden city than to be aboveground, stuck in traffic and perish with the fireball?

You would likely be better off waiting longer than 8 hours to be rescued; inhaling a bunch of radioactive dust is likely going to be a much worse death than being vaporized by heat, or smashed to death by the blast wave.

The radiation risk from fallout is goverened by the seven-ten rule: Each order of magnitude of seven increase in time (counting from one hour after detonation) reduces fallout by a factor of ten.

After 7 hours: 10%, after 49 hours (~2 days): 1%, after two weeks, 0.1%.

This is highly influenced by blast yield, type, elevation, and prevailing wind direction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout#The_Seven_Te...

The other problem with being in tunnels is the shock wave itself. That can collapse the tunnel, of course, but also kill directly through blast trauma. Blast is attenuated as the cube of distance, so an increased range from the blast itself will tremendously reduce those effects (and similarly the prompt radiation and thermal effects).

There 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.

Seriously 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.)

I'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.

Not necessarily, since there might not be anywhere to park (or the cost might be too high).

Good point, parking in American cities is way too cheap (often free).

Rush 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.

And also allow more flexible commercial real estate to be built. For example, in 1985 San Francisco passed Prop M which caps the limit of area of office space to ~1e6 square feet (think roughly 1,000 2-BR or 4,000 desk spaces) apartments that can be built -- disregarding any population changes or even if space is torn down. Meaning if the entire city was razed (say due to an earthquake) that amount per year. Iatrogenics abound

I 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".

That god damn heat.

Best weather in the country. July and August are hot, Ill give you that, but the rest of the year is awesome. And given I work and live in air-conditioned buildings, and have a huge pool in my backyard, July and August ain't too bad.

I 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.

Same for Dallas. My Friday home commute takes 45 min to an hour at 4 pm. It's only 9 miles.

I 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.

Why not just bike it?

Sure, 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.

Marfa is pretty bike friendly ;)

Not to mention arriving at work looking like a wet dishrag. Texas is pretty hot.

I think you will find you are breathing in that carbon monoxide in your car as well.

not true in dallas; every time i went out for a ride, people would just move over

it's a lot friendlier than NYC where folks will honk at you

There is almost zero long-distance biking infrastructure in the DFW metroplex, and drivers tend to be hostile to bicyclists. When I biked (casually and recreationally), I would stay on the sidewalks as much as I could, when they existed - which largely limited me to suburban and semi-urban areas.

There do exist huge and long bike trails, but they only connect arbitrary points of the city - imagine New York, but with all but two subway lines suddenly removed.

Interesting 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.

Average 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)

Max commute distance for most people is related to rush hour traffic not the average.

Well, 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.

The 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-th...

I 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-distanc...

I think you should investigate "isochrones"

An 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-...

Space 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.

Flying commercial is about 43% more efficient than driving.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2014/07/dri...

Given that we're looking at order-of-magnitude differences, that's "equivalently efficient".

The actual efficiencies depend tremendously on the range of the trip, the loading of the aircraft (or car), and base vehicle efficiency.

But ~30 - 40 passenger miles/gallon are possible in either.

For cargo, the (again, very rough) numbers are:

Ship: 514 ton * mile / gallon

Rail: 202 ton * mile / gallon

Truck: 59 ton * mile / gallon

Air: 13 ton * mile / gallon

Something I had cause to look up the other day as I was trying to figure out how to ship my M-1 Main Battle Tank.

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/MZ5Pi7AT...

Heh, 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.

I'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.

First 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).

“…by car”. Nothing about rail or other public transport sadly.

I've had success generating similar isochrones with Navitia : http://doc.navitia.io/#isochrones

Does 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.

It 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

Are 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?

This 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!

Obviously the data depends. But in places with a well-working train system, no matter what you do, the car is heavily inferior.

For example, Kiel-Berlin is 4 hours by car, assuming no traffic. Or around 1 hour 30 by train, which runs every 30 minutes. Getting to and from the station to any place in each city is another 30 minutes, in the worst case.

So the worst case scenario door-to-door train travel time is the same as the best case scenario door-to-door car travel time. And the comfort in a train is much nicer (so much leg space, and you can walk around, and eat stuff, and use a laptop nicely, just look at this: [1])

    ________________________

[1] https://www.fotosvonunterwegs.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/...

I think you misunderstood the question.

In all the rail cities I've been in, the distance/duration equation does not change based on when you leave.

Travel time is effectively constant.

This article was about what constitutes rush hour and how it mutates travel time.

For rail, it looks like the answer is "there isn't really a rush hour and it doesn't change things".

Or does it? I've certainly had to pass on an overpacked train on the London Underground and on SF Bart. Also in Barcelona the path to leave some stations can be circuitous and get congested at times. I haven't been to Tokyo yet but I've heard stories...

In many places, rail travel at rush hour can be faster because of express trains. At off-hours the trains tend to stop at every station and take longer.

Yes. There are widely-used rail systems in the majority of the cities with the worst traffic. If you reframe the question to how far you can get by any transit mode, the result looks very different in Seattle, which has some of the worst transit outcomes in the country, compared to NYC, which is not bad.

The first line of the article and the time this was posted both rule out anything but a personal vehicle in my mind. It's Friday afternoon and I want to leave work early means I'm going camping or something similar. Caltrain won't even get me to a relaxing weekend in Monterey, much less to a camp site in the Sierras.

My commute is what it is. 45 minutes to drive 12 miles sucks, but it only really bothers me when I'm going somewhere other than home.

It'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.

I 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.

You 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.

With all the fuss over North Korea recently, I was expecting a completely different sort of article for this headline.

I 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.

Anecdotally, 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.

In 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.

My 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.

That pattern happens in the DC area, especially in the summer.

I 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

World's largest highway system (28 lanes at some points), yet still the second most congested.

That 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.

I 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.

I 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.

New 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Within 5 hours of LA, I can get to both the lowest and highest point in the continental USA, I can see deserts and forest mountains, not to mention oceans, surfing, beachside houses that make cape code look cheap. Vegas is only 4 hours away, at most 5...

LA has absolutely the worse traffic.

I have no doubt you can see many things with no traffic in LA in 5 hours or less. Every time I have been there it's been horrendous that it makes Boston traffic look like a joke.

With New England it's not necessarily the traffic its the fact that the roads are smaller and not straight shots.

As far the Cape looking cheap which was a poor taste comment I would take it over any pacific beach :P .

The pacific coast beaches while do have surf are for some reason so cold with the some minor exceptions.

Over all I meant certain parts of cali and not LA specifically.

I moved to LA from Beijing and I'm amassed at how great the traffic is. It's all relative, I guess.

My point about Malibu vs. Cape Code was just about price, not value.

My overall argument wasn't that Boston is so special (albeit clearly it is as this article shows at the top). Its that the high congestion cities are far more compact and there are more things to do in less mileage (ignoring nature activities like hiking).

I'm annoyed that I said "parts of California" at all and probably should have said Texas (I clearly got downvoted for mentioning Cali didn't have things to do).

Lol @ the assumption that most of these cities don't have "4 seasons".

Also lol @ the assumption that there's only interesting things within 5 hours from the epicenter of Boston (I couldn't even type that with a straight face).

> Lol @ the assumption that most of these cities don't have "4 seasons".

I didn't say that. But for sure Boston has much more dramatic seasonal change than many of the cities on the list.

> Also lol @ the assumption that there's only interesting things within 5 hours from the epicenter of Boston (I couldn't even type that with a straight face).

I picked Boston but it applies to the top cities (from the article) as they are more compressed:

1. Boston - has intense seasons

2. Los Angeles - do noes not really have seasons

3. Miami - ditto

4. Chicago - extreme seasons like Boston

5. San Francisco - mild seasons

6. San Diego - no seasons whatsoever

I only picked Boston because I know it well. I don't want to get into the all natural hiking granola see the earth shit. Yes clearly areas like Las Vegas win at that.

The article even sort mentions my point: "Twenty miles might not seem like much, but in tightly packed New England, it’s the difference between being stuck in Massachusetts or escaping to neighboring Rhode Island or New Hampshire."

Otherwise why the hell do you think its so congested? More people and more stuff = more compact. Often this equals more things to see and do.

People in Massachusetts do not have to drive 60 miles to get to their job because stuff is more compact. In Atlanta they do!

I pick Atlanta because I have lived there and let me tell you have to drive quite a bit even to get to a reasonable body of water (Lake Lanier) let alone the ocean.

Why 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.

Summer 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.

The 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.

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