Does D.C. have the worst traffic? Not so fast.

Washington Post

2 days ago

Federal travel data is often used to rank cities on such metrics as 'best for new drivers' and 'most dangerous for going out at night.' Consumer Affairs, an online review platform, last week declared that the District has the worst traffic in the country.
Using surveys collected by the Census Bureau, probe data from the Federal Highway Administration and fatal crash data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the platform ranked cities using a combination of their average daily commute times, average length of daily congestion and annual rate of fatal crashes.
Consumer Affairs isn't the first to call D.C. out on its congestion — D.C. regularly ranks highly, if not always at the top, on 'worst traffic' lists. With more people commuting and returning to in-office work this year, D.C. traffic is trending back toward pre-pandemic levels. But here's why you should take the report's numbers with a grain of salt.
The report says D.C. topped the list of cities with the longest commute times, with the average being 33.4 minutes. The city with the second-longest commute time was Los Angeles, which had an average time of 30.5 minutes.
However, that data is from a 2023 Census Bureau survey. Since the census relies on surveys that take time to compile and analyze, the agency is always a little behind.
In 2023, we also wrote that commutes were miserable, and that people were driving more and often doing so outside the traditional rush hour. Cellphone data analyzed by the University of Maryland found that average travel time between thousands of neighborhoods in D.C., Virginia and Maryland had increased about 20 percent between 2019 and late 2022. The trajectory suggests commute times may be worse now. (Consumer Affairs did not respond to a request for comment on its report.)
The report also used older data on fatal crashes, showing sharp increases in D.C. and New York in 2023. But in both cities, police data indicates that fatal crashes have actually been far lower in 2025.
For congestion, the Consumer Affairs report does use more recent numbers collected from vehicle probes by the Federal Highway Administration from January to March of this year. The District ranks badly on that metric, at 6 hours and 35 minutes a day. Congestion has been trending upward and is now close to its 2019 height of 6 hours and 51 minutes.
Average commute times are also not a perfect representation of traffic, because they don't account for distance. A commute from far away is going to take more time than a closer one, regardless of how many other cars are on the road. That's why cities with large, sprawling suburbs tend to top these lists.
At the time this data was collected, the District (alongside other cities) was seeing a sharp rise in 'super-commuting' — traveling 75 miles or more to get to work, with average travel times of more than two hours. That contributes to a higher average commuting time overall. Cities cited as having less traffic than before, such as Columbus, Ohio, are also seeing their numbers change quickly and dramatically this year as more people work in person.
The data firm INRIX uses in-car technology to track actual travel lengths and speed to and from 'major employment centers within an urban area from surrounding commuting neighborhoods.' Its analysis ranks D.C. in the top 25 cities worldwide for traffic delays as of January, but below eight other major U.S. cities including Boston, Los Angeles and New York.
Consumer Affairs does note that 'congestion is oftentimes a sign of economic prosperity.' The cities that fare best on traffic measures tend to have shrinking populations and struggling economies.
'It's not news that a successful metropolitan region like the D.C. region has a lot of traffic,' said Stewart Schwartz of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, a nonprofit that advocates for denser urban areas with less need to drive. Concentrating future growth near transit, he said, 'is the best way for our region to grow without choking on traffic.'
Congestion pricing, which charges for access to thin out demand, can also improve traffic. New York recently implemented the practice in downtown Manhattan and saw travel times drop significantly; Virginia has engaged in a form of congestion pricing through tolled express lanes.
Finally, in some cases transportation planners are intentionally trying to slow down traffic for safety reasons. The Federal Highway Administration measures free-flow speeds as the 85th percentile of observed speeds without traffic signals and other vehicles on the road. Bike and bus lanes, roundabouts, and speed cameras all can keep vehicles from going at the speed of free-flowing traffic — and all these measures are implemented in parts of the D.C. area.
Every three years, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, a federally mandated regional planning group, does an in-depth survey of local commute times. It looks at commute length and time, where people are commuting from and to, and how they commute. The most recent data collection period just ended, and the report should be out late this year or early next year. Several hundred thousand surveys were issued, and about 8,000 were returned.
The group's last report, released in 2022, reflected the pandemic shifts to remote work and more car trips taken alone. The commuting times found in that survey are generally higher than the census data — 37 minutes each way, which was a drop from 43 minutes in its 2019 survey. A key difference is that the Census Bureau considers a much larger and more rural area as part of the D.C. region, stretching out to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and Harpers Ferry in West Virginia.
Anecdotally, Daniel Sheehan of the council said that it is seeing far more interest in its Commuter Connections program, which helps people carpool or take transit to work. 'There are some people here in this region that started three or four years ago, and it's the first time they're regularly going to their office,' he said. What the council doesn't know and hopes to learn from the data is to what extent commuters are taking transit more often because of congestion.