Many Seattle residents have kept the pandemic's ultimate perk: trading the grueling I-5 crawl for a morning commute to the living room. The most recent census data, from 2024, shows that about one-quarter of the city's employed residents now work from home.
But even those who still slog into the workplace every day gained a significant benefit: reduced travel time. According to the latest Census Bureau data, the average one-way commute for Seattleites fell by 2 minutes, 30 seconds, between 2019 and 2024, dropping from 28 minutes, 24 seconds, to 25 minutes, 54 seconds. That happened even as the number of employed city residents increased by 15,000.
A 2 ½-minute drop might not sound like a life-changing windfall, but in the glacial world of demographic data, it is a major shift. And look at it this way: for the average commuter, adding up both legs of the trip over a year of five-day workweeks translates to more than 20 hours of travel time shaved off the clock.
To be clear, those lucky enough to work from home do not count as zero" in the Census Bureau's calculations, which would artificially drag down the average. They are simply not part of the equation, meaning this drop reflects a genuine time savings for active commuters.
Nationally, commute times have also dropped, but only by a fraction compared with Seattle. The U.S. average one-way trip was 27 minutes, 12 seconds in 2024, down just 24 seconds from the prepandemic high.
Among the 50 largest U.S. cities, Seattle tied for the third-largest decline in average commute time. We were bested only by two cities in California: Oakland, which saw an impressive 3-minute, 12-second drop, and San Jose, which shed 3 minutes. We tied with San Francisco and Detroit, with both cities seeing 2-minute, 30-second drops.
While Seattle's drop was among the largest, most big cities — 36 of the 50 — saw at least some decline. The main driver was the rise of remote work, which helped free up clogged roads during rush hour.
But Seattle's disproportionately large decline likely stems from a second factor: a phenomenon known as the "transit penalty."
Simply put, transit commuters take a lot longer to get to work, on average, than folks who drive. The size of that “penalty” might surprise you. Nationally, the average one-way commute time for a solo driver was 26 ½ minutes in 2024, but for a transit rider, it was 49 ½ minutes — a lot of that time eaten up by waiting for the next bus or having to transfer.
In Seattle, transit commuting declined much more than car commuting as remote work grew. In 2019, 25% of Seattle residents used public transit to get to work. By 2024, that figure had dropped to 15%. Because remote work replaced those long transit trips and removed them from the census math entirely, the city's overall average plummeted.
The same pattern unfolded in Oakland and San Francisco, which saw similarly massive increases in remote work and sharp declines in transit commuting.
For the two other cities in the Top 5 — San Jose and Detroit — transit wasn't the main story. Both are historically car-dependent cities that never had large shares of transit commuters, and both have many "reverse commuters who drive out of the city to work. Their declining commute times are more due to fewer cars on the road.
In San Jose, that's partly because tech companies moved to remote and hybrid work arrangements. On top of that, the city's employed population fell by 15,000 from 2019 to 2024 as tech companies shed jobs, also reducing the number of cars on the road.
Detroit, where the population has been in free fall for decades, lost more than 14,000 employed residents in that same period. With a shrinking local workforce and fewer suburban commuters, regional freeways were less clogged.
Of course, the map looks very different if you head south, where a handful of cities actually saw their commute times worsen. Tulsa, Okla., saw the biggest increase among large cities, adding more than one minute to its average trip. Tampa, Fla.; Fort Worth, Texas; and Jacksonville, Fla., followed, each adding 48 seconds.
The Sunbelt is experiencing explosive, pandemic-era population growth. An influx of new residents, combined with relatively low shares of remote workers, is pushing regional road infrastructure past its limits and leaving some workers with longer drives than ever before.
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