All the more reason to allow more workers to do their work from home. Reduce traffic, reduce commutes, reduce pollution. Endless winning, all for the price of giving up daily hell commute to office environments that make us sick.
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They are bad while it’s down, but you get past them. Assuming it really is better once they reopen.
Just look at WMATA in DC every summer. Or, the extra fun this year, December project.
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On 128?
Or are we talking something like 27 and surface roads?
Or, really west and on 495?
I remember 495 being bad, but nothing like 128. I think of 128 as much closer than 10 miles from the city border (if not from downtown).
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My favorite was (22-24 years ago) they’d work on/hose up a bunch of east-west routes simultaneously:
“Damn, North Loop is tied up, better try Koenig- dammit!”
Next day: “Let’s try 45th today- crap, guess I’ll use 38th- d’oh!”
Day after that: “there’s gotta be a break here somewhere, they can’t work on every street, maybe if I come all the way down to 15th - aaaaaarrgh!”
Some (certainly not all) was due to telecom companies laying fiberoptic cables & tearing up the streets in the process. At least that investment paid off, as I’m sure Austin benefits from citywide lightning-fast internet speeds, given all that fiber infrastructure, right?
Right?
This sounds like the D.C. area (which I thought might be worse than #8). My wife drives from northern P.G. County to the Chevy Chase area (ETA: ~17 miles) each workday, & if she doesn’t hit the road by 6:10 or so, the Beltway option is right out for getting there by 7. I used to commute from same but to Reston VA, then later, Rockville MD, but mercifully work is now close to home (~4 miles, 10 min.)
Edited for typoe’s
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… AFAIK that’s really just New York
It’s nuts that >50% of people drive in San Francisco and Boston and places like that, but they do 
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I mostly go surface roads to 95N, then take 128N. The backup at the 95/128 junction is always terrible.There are shortcuts that sometimes work and sometimes don’t, for no reason I can discern.
When our office was in Cambridge I used to take 495 to 90 and Comm Ave to Kendall Square. Hideous.
I’ll freely admit though that I am not one of those drivers that knows 18 ways from A to B and can talk at length about the benefits of the Sean Hurley O’Sullivan Rotary vs. the Feeney Brothers Public Alley No.134.
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That entire area is a disaster. The best work around is a job that’s west of 495 instead. 
Everyone in Boston assumes the world ends at 128 anyway, might as well go all the way past 495. Perhaps really wild and all the way to Worcester 
When we lived up there, my wife looked at a job in Cambridge. Nothing made it worthwhile at all. As far as we could tell, it’s impossible to commute to Cambridge from anywhere South of 90 or West of 128. The only options looked like living in Cambridge or maybe immediately to the Northwest. With every mile further Northwest making it exponentially worse. A move that we didn’t want to make at the time, or at least not for that job opportunity. It’s amazing how close to Boston Cambridge is, yet there’s no way to commute there at all from anywhere.
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If you get fast you could bike that distance in under 2 hours. Well, depending on elevation profile.
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if no one here is fully aware of just why Miami sits at number 5 on this list, let me just affirmatively state:
Miami fucking sucks!
now you know.
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Live in Chicago, worked in SF for a year before the pandemic. SF traffic was far far worse than Chicago’s. It’s not even in the same universe. Chicago’s not fun but, in general, we move faster than geological drift, whereas in SF I felt I could easily have crawled to work faster.
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There’s always the option of going by sea. 
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someone on board was late for work!
also, Haulover Inlet enters discussion of Miami commute:
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The Boston Whaler at 3m for the win!
That’s some smooth navigating.
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The shut-downs might fix the speed restrictions. But the problems with the T aren’t just the trains and the tracks but the stations as well.
I didn’t realize just how long the subways in Boston have been operating. From Wikipedia:
Streetcar congestion in downtown Boston led to the subways in 1897 and elevated rail in 1901.
and
Opened in September 1897, the four-track-wide segment of the Green Line tunnel between Park Street and Boylston stations was the first subway in the United States, and has been designated a National Historic Landmark. The downtown portions of what are now the Green, Orange, Blue, and Red line tunnels were all in service by 1912.
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Beautiful. I know every street in a modern city can’t be a happy-making residential pedestrian laneway like those, but there has to be better than these other extremes (also from Philly).
https://wmmr.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2023/08/Philly-traffic.jpg
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It’s one of the things that keeps me from looking at housing out that way.
And there’s the point I don’t see acknowledged anywhere in the OP. @mmascari
gave a similar great example about Cambridge.
People have agency in both where they live, and where they work. How many people don’t look for (or take) better jobs or better housing because of the extra commute time it would create? How many couples have one partner take a lower-paying job closer to home because the other has a long commute? Or live in housing that doesn’t meet their needs because the housing that does and is in their price range is too far away from work?
Honestly, the fact that the averages and hours-spent-in-delays vary so little in absolute terms, even across cities that vary in population by a factor of >20 and in area by a factor of >5, should be striking to anyone who thinks those numbers are a function of traffic in the cities, rather than a function of the choices people make about their lives given the conditions in the cities. Really, why don’t they have the number of miles included in the data?
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