There’s No Such Thing As “Rush Hour” Now It’s “All Day” Traffic
Remember the “good old days’ when you could depend on knowing when the heavy traffic hours were? Ok, if you were in traffic, you wouldn’t think it was so great, but at least you knew what to expect. That was generally between the hours Morning Rush of 6am-9am and the Afternoon Rush between 4pm and 6Pm, of course that could longer depending on the day.
If traffic seems lighter during the old “rush hours” you are not wrong.
This could be good news or bad news depending on when you head off to work . . .
A study found rush hour is evolving. There aren’t as many cars on the road pre-9:00 A.M. anymore, because traffic is getting more spaced out. But in a lot of cities, that means there’s a mini rush hour ALL DAY LONG now.
The report found the “midday rush hour” is worse than ever. There are almost as many cars on the road at noon as there are at 9:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M. It’s been the general trend since covid hit and flexible hybrid schedules became a thing.
You’d think spreading it out might mean there’d NEVER be a rush hour. But another report found public transportation never fully rebounded after the pandemic. So there are just more cars on the road.
The traffic analyst behind the report said there’s “less of a morning commute, less of an evening commute, and much more afternoon activity” now. And maybe get used to it. He called it the “new normal.”
So, what is causing these new “all day traffic” rush hours? For most of us, for better or worse the working world was forever changed during and after the COVID pandemic. If you recall those days, you remember that there was hardly any traffic any time of day and getting to and from work was a relative breeze. This was of course because of the huge numbers of people that were either not working or working from home. Not to mention that schools were closed and moved online.
It’s not just people are working from home, it’s also the new “flex hours’ policies that some companies have adopted. It’s no longer the norm to work 9-5 (sorry Dolly Parton) now the workday could be even shorter or not confined to just those hours. This also adds to the “all day traffic” situation.
It seems that ever since those days the working world has never gotten back to the pre-COVID norms. For a lot of us, that is okay because working from home has it’s benefits, like not being stuck in “all day traffic”.
(CNBC)
