The Worst Commute in Every Major US Metro
For each of 32 metro areas: the census tract where commuting 60+ minutes is most common, a real address in it, and the drive to downtown — timed to arrive at 8:00am on a Tuesday with live traffic. The worst is Las Vegas: 55.9 miles, 153 minutes, leave at 05:27. Each route also carries the morning's fastest and slowest departure and the steepest fifteen-minute step — in San Francisco, leaving Contra Costa at 6:30 instead of 6:15 costs eleven extra minutes. These are representative pairs, not individuals: the home end is a real address in the tract, the work end is the CBD. Where a metro's tract scores high but drives short, its commuters are mostly not going downtown — flagged as cbd_assumption_weak. New York and Chicago rank on transit time, not distance, and are flagged transit_metro. Home data: ACS 2023 5-year B08303. Routing: Azure Maps.
Fields
| Name | Filled | Example |
|---|---|---|
| city | 100% | Las Vegas |
| kind | 100% | route |
| name | 100% | Las Vegas — 55.9 mi, leave 05:27 |
| as_of | 100% | 2026-08-11 |
| metro | 100% | Las Vegas-Henderson-North Las Vegas, NV |
| miles | 100% | 55.9 |
| tract | 100% | Census Tract 56.13; Clark County; Nevada |
| home_address | 100% | Overton, NV 89040 |
| work_address | 100% | 100 North 6th Street, Las Vegas, NV 89101 |
| must_leave_by | 100% | 05:27 |
| steepest_step | 100% | 05:00→05:15 |
| transit_metro | 100% | false |
| fastest_depart | 100% | 08:00 |
| slowest_depart | 100% | 05:30 |
| fastest_minutes | 100% | 150.2 |
| slowest_minutes | 100% | 152.9 |
| share_60plus_pct | 100% | 36.3 |
| workers_in_tract | 100% | 1364 |
| cbd_assumption_weak | 100% | false |
| minutes_to_arrive_8am | 100% | 153 |
| share_60plus_floor_pct | 100% | 24.8 |
| steepest_step_cost_min | 100% | 0.4 |