According to the Census Bureau, 2.8 million people commute to work 90 minutes or more each day, in each direction.
Now, your daily commute may not be as long, but time spent in cars, forbes trains and buses is time away from work and from family. Drive-time can affect a person’s Quality of Life and it’s one reason why Forbes Magazine’s Best and Worst Commutes is worth reviewing.
Measuring travel time, road congestion and travel delays in the 60 largest metropolitan areas, Forbes ranks city commutes from best-to-worst with Salt Lake City topping the list and Tampa-St. Petersburg finishing it.
The Top 5 Commutes, as compiled by Forbes: apkdnews
- Salt Lake City, Utah
- Buffalo-Niagara Falls, New York
- Rochester, New York
- Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, Wisconsin
- Albany-Schenectady-Troy, New York
The bottom 5 are Tampa-St. Petersburg, Detroit, Atlanta, Orlando, and Dallas-Forth Worth.
Long commutes shouldn’t deter you from moving to a particular city, home4cloud but the potential commute should be consideration. Before making an offer on your next home, make a rush-hour commute to work from your potential new neighborhood. Then imagine doing it every day.
Behind the Numbers
To find the cities with the best commutes, we measured travel time, road congestion and travel delays for the 60 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the U.S. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we calculated what percentage of commuters in each metro area took an hour or more to get to work in each of these cities in 2008, the most recent year for which these data are kept.
To find the areas with the fewest cars on the road, we next factored in the percentage of commuters who carpooled or used alternatives to driving like walking, biking or taking public transportation in 2008. We referred to this as the “green commuter” ranking. Finally, we looked at the Travel Time Index, a measure that the Texas Transportation Institute, a transportation research organization, uses to measure delays. The TTI indicates how long a commute takes during rush hour compared to the same trip in ideal conditions. A short commute is good, but a dependably short commute is even better. The most recent TTI data is from 2007, and was released in July 2009.
We ranked the metros on each of those measures, and then averaged the rankings for the final score. We gave heavier weight to travel time and congestion measures, since many of the cities have minimal differences in TTI numbers.
