New York City Has Worst Commute Time, Buffalo the Best

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 12:26PM EST · Published Mar 3, 6:46AM EST

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New York City Has Worst Commute Time, Buffalo the Best — © Thinkstock

The largest city in the United States has the longest commute time. A rapidly shrinking city has the shortest, according to housing site Trulia.

The average compute time in New York City is 34.7 minutes. Two cities among the top 10 in commute time are close by. The commute in Long Island is 33.0 minutes, which puts it in second place on the list. The commute in Newark, N.J., is 31.1 minutes, which places it fourth. The balance of the top 10 are also large cities: Washington at 32.8 minutes, Chicago at 30.8 minutes, Boston at 30.4 minutes, Oakland at 29.9 minutes, Riverside-San Bernardino at 29.8 minutes, Baltimore at 29.4 minutes and Atlanta at 29.2 minutes.

Buffalo is at the other end of the spectrum. Commute time to the city is 20.3 minutes. Whether or not it is related, the city has lost much of its population since the 1960s. The city with the second shortest commute has a large population of students. Columbus has a commute time of 21.8 million. After that, Milwaukee’s commute time is 22.3 minutes, followed by Hartford and Memphis at 22.5 minutes, Virginia Beach at 22.6 minutes, West Palm Beach at 23.0 minutes, San Diego at 23.0 minutes as well, and Cincinnati at 23.2 minutes.

Methodology:

Trulia’s U.S. population survey was conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of Trulia from November 19-23, 2015 among 2,016 adults ages 18 and older. The online survey is not based on probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated. For complete survey methodology, including weighting variables, please contact [email protected]

Survey data was filtered so that only those with full- or part-time jobs were included. In addition, data on millennials included only those who are current renters as of the survey date or those who responded as willing to move into a rental home within the next 12 months as of the survey date. Survey data came with weights for each observation so as to enable us to accurately represent characteristics of the U.S. population.

For the rest of the analysis, 2014 American Community Survey (ACS) data was used. Observations that were heads-of-households, 18 or older, and also employed were used to compute statistics. Certain metro areas with sample size issues were excluded. These metro areas were as follows: Philadelphia, Montgomery County, Pa., Camden, N.J., Kansas City, Mo., Louisville, Ky., Nashville, Tenn., New Orleans and Oklahoma City.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.