Study: Hub commute among worst in the country
5th worst in new study, 2nd worst in one from last year
The “unbearable” traffic seen at times in Boston places it fifth for worst commutes in the country, a new study found.
Boston drivers spend an average of 32.6 minutes on each leg of their commute, with 15.6% stuck in gridlock for more than an hour per trip, according to research conducted by Automoblog, using 2021 U.S. Census data.
The Bay State capital was only outranked by Riverside, Calif.; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; and New York City, which took the top spot with the largest share of commuters, 22.7%, spending more than an hour in traffic per trip.
“Drivers in Boston have it rough, to say the least,” said David Straughan, who commissioned the study. “According to some, ‘rush hour’ can start as early as 6 a.m. and extend as late as 7 p.m. most days of the week.”
But it’s not just rush hour that drives the city’s congestion problem, according to Straughan, who said its successful professional sports teams can make traffic “unbearable at almost any time,” due to fans swarming the stadiums.
“Traffic on the Southeast Expressway portion of I-93 regularly grinds to a halt, but drivers heading north of the city towards Cambridge and Somerville via Route 28 consistently face Boston’s worst congestion,” Straughan said.
The study, which notably used 2021 data, comes weeks after INRIX, a global transportation data and analytics company, ranked Boston traffic as secondworst in the country and fourth-worst in the world in 2022.
According to INRIX, Boston is ranked behind London, Chicago and Paris, but ahead of New York City with the highest “traffic delay times.”
The typical Boston driver lost 134 hours to congestion, up 56 hours from 2021 when it was ranked fourth in the U.S. and 18th in the world, INRIX found.
Boston Chief of Streets Jascha Franklin-Hodge said the city is continuing to see changes in traffic patterns following the pandemic.
Mondays and Fridays are not much lighter, in terms of congestion, than what would have been seen on a typical weekday pre-pandemic, and the city is seeing a return to very heavy traffic mid-week, Franklin-Hodge said.
“We’ve had a few days over the last couple of weeks where the interstates coming through Boston have jammed up in the evening rush hour to a degree that is then spilled over onto city streets, causing really tremendous congestion in the city,” he said.
Franklin-Hodge said there may have been contributing factors over that time period, such as the weather and a tractortrailer crash on I-93 that pushed a fence onto the Red Line tracks and caused major congestion.
But, he said, what’s become abundantly clear is that the region’s highway network is at capacity at peak traveling times, and that congestion has profound implications for a driver’s ability to reach their destination.
“Fundamentally, our view on this is that we can’t build our way out of traffic congestion,” Franklin-Hodge said. “We’re in a land-constrained space. We can’t add highway lanes or add new highways, and the city streets we have cannot grow or get bigger. The only thing we can do is give people good alternatives.”
To that end, he said the city is focused on investing its resources in public transit and alternative modes of transportation, by adding bike lanes, improving pedestrian safety, and providing priority space for buses.
“All of these are tools in the toolkit, but there’s no solution for our region to grow or even to sustain its current level of activity without having an increased use of transit and bikes and walking,” Franklin-Hodge said.