It feels like everywhere you go everyone is convinced that they have the worst commute home from work on Friday evening. The question is, is your commute actually longer or does it just feel that way because it’s Friday, it’s the weekend, and more than ever you are ready to be home to start your weekend and spend all the money that you earned the last 5 days? Well, according to a recent study by the traffic research firm Inrix, our awful Friday commute is not just a product of our impatience.
As it turns out, in terms of traffic congestion, there is no worse time to get behind the wheel than a Friday afternoon. The added congestion can be attributed to a few different factors. In the afternoons in general, traffic tends to be slower than in the mornings because in the morning people are going straight to work. After work however, people make lots of stops on their way home to pick up food, their kids, or just run general errands. On Fridays, add in all the people trying to escape the city to cash in on their 2 night B&B stay, complete with wine tasting and cucumber exfoliating masks that they purchased on Groupon… and you have yourself a legitimate transportation nightmare.
So let’s settle this once and for all. Next time you’re stuck in traffic on Friday evening, and you call your college drinking buddy in Nashville, TN (using your hands-free Bluetooth of course) and he tries to tell you that the traffic he’s stuck in is worse than the traffic you are stuck in, you can pull over safely to the side of the road, come to complete stop, remove the key from your ignition and send him the link to this blog.
The 15 WORST cities for the Friday afternoon commute:
1. Los Angeles, CA
2. San Francisco, CA
3. Honolulu, HI (really!?)
4. Austin, TX
5. Bridgeport, CT
6. Seattle, WA
7. New York, NY
8. Portland, OR
9. Washington, DC
10. Chicago, IL
11. Baton Rouge, LA
12. San Jose, CA
13. Boston, MA
14. Virginia Beach, VA
15. Philadelphia, PA
