For many Americans, the drive to and from work requires enduring slow-moving, soul-draining traffic. The commute remains one of the top gripes that workers have about returning to offices.
But in certain cities, driving during rush hour is a breeze.
Columbus, Ohio; Memphis, Tenn.; and Milwaukee have some of the fastest commutes, clocking in around 22 minutes one way, according to a new analysis of federal data looking at cities. While the data includes all types of commutes, three out of four American workers drive. When measured by miles an hour, Fort Worth, Texas, Memphis and Detroit have speedy commutes. They average 27 miles an hour—or 4 mph faster than the U.S. average—without having to slow down for congestion, according to research conducted by the Harris Poll and ride-share company Lyft. Most commuters say time, rather than cost, is their most important factor.
“Just getting around town is very simple,” Vahid Behzadi, 45, says of his Fort Worth commute. “It’s a big city, but it’s not overwhelmed with traffic.”
Behzadi drives to Fort Worth a couple of times a week from his home in Frisco, Texas, 50 miles away. The founder of Pocket Case Manager, a software platform for disability-service providers, says it takes about 45 minutes on the highway, and there’s a toll road option if the highway is backed up. Before moving to Texas several years ago, he commuted in Los Angeles for 15 years.
“In L.A., any time of the day, you’re probably stuck somewhere,” Behzadi says.
Quickest commutes
On average, workers spend nearly 27 minutes commuting each way to and from work, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Shaving just three minutes per trip off a commute three days a week can save a worker 13 hours a year, according to the new analysis.
Minutes matter
The cities with the fastest drive times either had visionary urban planning, well-run public transit programs that help ease car traffic or smaller populations on bigger roadways that made the commute less frustrating, transportation researchers and city officials say.
Memphis, for instance, installed 150 miles of fiber optics to coordinate traffic signals and gather real-time data on traffic flow. The technology has helped to reduce average travel time on major roadways by about 20%, said Randall Tatum, the city’s senior traffic engineering administrator.
It takes Jeremy Adams, a director of IT certificate programs at Columbus State Community College, half an hour to commute to downtown Columbus from his home in Dublin, Ohio, north of the city, driving 65 miles an hour on the freeway.
“You pretty much have a highway available to you within a 10-minute to 15-minute drive,” he said of how suburbs in the area are planned and connected. “There’s usually two or three ways to get somewhere in about the same amount of time.”
Multiple highway options, as opposed to one primary route, distinguishes Columbus from other cities where Adams has commuted, including Atlanta. On a business trip to Norcross, Ga., driving from his hotel to the office should have taken less than 10 minutes but could require 30 minutes of sitting in traffic, Adams said.
Bad commutes
Commute times have crept up since 2021, as companies called workers back to offices, but drive times remain shorter than before the pandemic. In 2023, Americans spent an average 26.8 minutes commuting one way to work, compared with 27.6 minutes in 2019, according to the Census Bureau.
In addition to federal commuting data, researchers synthesized Lyft data on traffic speeds to and from offices during rush hours in 35 of the largest cities. Their ranking also gives high speed scores to Las Vegas, San Diego and Tucson, Ariz.
New York, Chicago and Los Angeles have the highest number of hours lost to delays during car commutes, according to transportation research firm Inrix. Rush-hour drivers there waste between 89 and 101 hours a year in traffic. Some metro areas, including Washington, D.C., Seattle, and Charlotte, N.C., show less commute time lost to delays compared with 2019. That reflects an enduring shift to remote and hybrid work, as well as commuters with flexible schedules driving during non-rush hour periods, said Bob Pishue, Inrix’s senior economist and transportation analyst.
Cities known for torturously slow commutes can have significantly slower-than-average travel times during rush hours than they do at other times of the day.
In Boston, for example, a trip home on a Saturday night might take 20 minutes while on a Friday afternoon the same route could take six times as long, according to Eric Bourassa, director of transportation at Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council. That might be why Boston has among the fewest car commuters in the U.S., the report says. A full 13% of commuters there walk to work.