Virus curtails Houston’s traffic for now.

Jenny Marston had no trouble keeping a socially-acceptable distance between her and the other cars on Monday morning.

Her trip along Interstate 10 from near Katy to her office in Rice Military along Washington Avenue can take 50 minutes on an average day, she said. On Monday it took 26 minutes.

“I was 20 minutes early for work,” Marston, 34, said with a chuckle. “I stopped and got everybody bagels.”

The coronavirus and spring break have done in Houston what 50 years of lane widening and transit investment could not: It cured traffic, albeit for only a few days so far and for a grim reason.

Experts in traffic and planning said there is no doubt traffic is reduced — fewer people are going to work, and the vast majority of leisure trips are canceled. They just cannot draw any conclusions so far about what to expect, or what it tells us about our driving habits.

“I feel like we are in a different world than last week,” said Christof Spieler, an urban planner and Rice University lecturer on engineering and architecture. “I feel we don’t know this world yet.”

During the peak morning commute, most of the region’s mostclogged freeway lanes remained virtually free-flowing, with speeds 10 mph, sometimes 20 mph, above their normal averages for that time of day. For example, on a typical Monday, northbound traffic on Interstate 45 between Loop 610 and Telephone Road usually flows around 26 mph at 7:45 a.m. At 7:45 a.m. Monday, traffic was moving an average of 62 mph.

“I’ve never seen it like that,” said Teddy Bailey, 33, who commutes from Eado to the Texas Medical Center.

Officials cautioned that selfquarantines were not the only factor on traffic. Houston Independent School District, the largest in the region, is on spring break. That annually drops traffic volumes, as does spring break for suburban districts, many of which were out last week.

Buses and trains also are seeing less use, though transit officials said the ups and downs of a few days cannot be used to draw conclusions. Analysts with Metropolitan Transit Authority said overall bus ridership Monday-throughThursday of last week was comparable to other spring break weeks — though HISD was not on spring break last week. Ridership Friday dropped by 15.2 percent. Rail trips also dipped, including the loss of 100,000 trips because of the cancellation of the Houston Livestock

Show and Rodeo.

Where the largest dip was seen was in park and ride use, which experienced even greater declines last week than typical spring break weeks in suburban districts. Across all commuter routes, ridership was down 15 percent last week compared to previous spring break years.

Many things can curtail commuting in the Houston area — tropical storms such as Harvey and Imelda chief among them — but what makes the COVID-19 dip different is that road use is not compromised. In flooding events, the roads are impassable. Today they are not. People, at least the past few days, are choosing not to drive.

“Often we talk about traffic as if it is inevitable,” Spieler said, “when this shows it is not.”

Researchers are watching the traffic pattern, said Tim Lomax, a senior researcher at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. Lomax said officials cannot draw many conclusions from the past few days, other than that fewer people are driving. They cannot say whether the free-flowing conditions will convince anyone to alter their normal habits — especially as they have bigger things such as the virus on their minds.

Long-term, Lomax said he would expect commuters to adjust even if more people are staying home, which could mean that slow-downs at peak commuting times return, even with fewer travelers, because people start expecting their normal 45-minute commutes to only take 20 minutes.

“They’ll just leave a few minutes later, and you’ll have that rush hour period again,” Lomax said.