Though more companies are allowing employees to work from home, the average daily commute keeps getting worse.
If you’re like me, you avoid traffic like it’s a 4-year-old with a runny nose, so knowing where commutes are miserable is vital when job hunting or considering a move. Below are the 19 worst cities and metro areas for commuters.
Many on this list are the typical big cities you’d expect, but others are tiny towns you might not expect to have such massive commute times.
To find the cities and metro areas with the worst commutes, we looked to the five-year estimated one-way commuting times in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. We filtered out any areas with significant overlaps and sorted them from lowest to highest times.
To break the few ties we had, we estimated how many hours per year the average commuter spent on the road by multiplying their average round-trip commute by 52 (the weeks in a year). We then took the number of hours per year and multiplied it by the mean hourly wage in the area, which we obtained from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to determine how much potential yearly income they lost on the road.
The more income the commuters lost on the road, the worse the city or metro area ranked.