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It is hard to ignore the fact that there is hardly anyone in their office like before. Actually, just 5% of the workforce worked completely from home before the pandemic. For more than two years now, the offices have not been outdone half fulland more than a third of workers who can work from home can do so at all times. One of the most commonly cited benefits of working out of the office is the fact that it means avoiding the slog of commuting, which can be the more expensive of the two. financially and time-wise.
But in one Wednesday’s blog posteconomic blogger Kevin Drum, formerly of Mother Jones, unearthed a new mystery: Somehow, commuter traffic is just as bad as it was before the pandemic. With empty offices and millions fewer people commuting to work now, how could that be?
Last year, Axios reviewed in 2021 TomTom Traffic Index and determined that commuter congestion is increasing every month after the recession first hit the pandemic. A researcher behind the traffic index, which pulls from hundreds of millions of GPS signals, said that despite the remote work, rush hour is “slowly coming back.”
That slow trickle became inevitable. Drum points to traffic data from 2021 — the peak remote-work era — in notoriously car-centric Los Angeles; this is down only 6% from 2019, according to the state Department of Transportation. Things aren’t much better in other major metros. According to TomTom Traffic Index data, the time spent in traffic in the morning and evening rushes Atlanta, Chicagoand Miami all increased between 2021 and 2022—along with fuel prices and tolls.
Those tracks, considering that traffic congestion actually INCREASING in 2022, although it will still be below pre-pandemic levels. That trend continued this year; Drum cited national data from the Office of Highway Policy Information, which shows urban interstate travel has nearly doubled since 2020, where it was in 2019.
Naturally, it’s confusing. “Despite the empty offices, rush hour congestion is back, with the main roads leading in and out of our cities clogged again,” said Martin Morzynski, senior VP of traffic marketing. analytics firm Streetlight, says in the company’s introduction to 2023 “Downtown Congestion Post-COVID” trend report. That rush hour congestion is a bit different in the post-pandemic world.
Rush hour turned into a rush time
Streetlight’s report found that the share of traffic during peak hours decreased from 10.3% in early 2019 to 9.8% in early 2022, but the authors are left scratching their heads as to why the drop is not too big. As they point out, post-pandemic car travel is now happening much closer to home, away from city centers. “Miles traveled are less in approximately 27% of downtowns in our largest cities,” the report reads, and some evidence suggests that congestion in big cities “will return faster than miles traveled in some cities, and those peak hours may shift as part of our new normal.”
Despite the unknown resurgence of rush hour congestion, their research found, it’s less so as people’s schedules become more flexible and they get more rest in their hours — traffic builds up later than before and returns faster during off-peak hours. .
Indeed, Axios’ TomTom’s data analysis found that instead of “killing” remote work during rush hour in America, it actually ended the spread of traffic throughout the day. In some cities, that looks like a “late morning peak” of congestion around 11 a.m., and an early night peak around 4 p.m.
“Congestion is not caused by the total amount of traffic, but by the number of peak hours,” reads a new National Library of Medicine report entitled “Rush hour-and-a-half: Traffic spreads after lockdown.” It found that even if the traffic matches the pre-pandemic level—which, with all the data above, it essentially has—the “differences in distribution” are the key. “Traffic flow is not linear. A small reduction in peak demand on a congested road can lead to a large reduction in traffic congestion.
‘Change and change’
That drivers once again find themselves losing hundreds of hours each year behind the wheel is “a big mystery,” as Drum says, and it’s likely to be even more so. confusing Some experts say that the offices not reach 60% capacity again. While fully remote work is on the decline—it’s falling into a less than 26% last month—but it is still the dominant practice in most companies to allow off-duty work at least a few days per week. (The best approach is “organized hybrid,” experts say, which ensures workers don’t muscle in on a trip to show up for a empty office.)
But hybrid schedules can make trips longer than traditional work set-ups, hence the shift to peak hours.
Last year, David Schrank, a senior research scientist at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, spoke to Washington Post that commuters can expect to see “volatility and variability” on the road until the country reaches some sort of agreement on how and when they will commute. “We’re all going to face more uncertainty in our journey because we don’t know if this is the day everyone will come in as well,” he said.
The irritating mystery reminds of a Jake Wood recently commented, the CEO of the corporate philanthropy company Groundswell about the obligation to work in an office. “I understand the employee’s perspective, but I think it’s missing something critical: It’s not just about you,” Wood wrote in LinkedIn, which refers to workers who insist on working from home. “You can do your work on time and to the standard in an isolated environment. But what about your colleagues? Without your presence, leadership, coaching – can they improve?
Now, the question can be fairly reversed: Coming to the office isn’t just about you – it’s also about other motorists who can’t work remotely praying that you’ll choose to stay home.
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