Cities with the Longest Commutes in America
It takes workers in New York City nearly twice as long to get to work as it takes employees in Oklahoma City.
With an average commute of 39.7 minutes, New Yorkers have the longest slog to work in the country, according to a new analysis by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Institute. That’s nearly 18 percent longer than the average commute in Chicago (33.7 minutes), the city with the second longest-commute on the list.
By comparison, the average commute time for the nation is 25.8 minutes, and commuters in Oklahoma City, where commutes are shortest, take an average of 20.7 minutes to get to work.
The averages don’t tell the whole picture, however, and some commuters spend far more time each day traveling to work. About 8 percent of U.S. workers spend more than an hour getting to the office, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
SLIDESHOW: 10 Cities With The Longest Commutes
The University of Michigan study also ranks the cities where workers are most likely to walk to work. The cities with the most walkers were Boston (14.5 percent), Washington, D.C. (13.6 percent) and San Francisco (10.9 percent.)
For the entire country, 2.8 percent of workers walked to their jobs each day, but the percentage was even lower in some cities. Just 1.2 percent of workers in Fort Worth walk to their jobs, followed by Oklahoma City (1.3 percent) and Jacksonville (1.4 percent).
Portland, Ore., was the city with the highest percentage (5.9 percent) of employees bicycling to work. Across the country just 0.6 percent of workers bike to the office, with the lowest percentage (0.3 percent) in Charlotte, Dallas, Nashville, Oklahoma City and San Antonio.
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