WASHINGTON -- Guess who doesn't have the country's worst commute?
D.C. may have the country's worst traffic. But according to new Census Bureau data, the nation's capital only has the second-longest commute. By a handful of seconds.
Tuesday's Census report lists the average one-way commute in 2011 for the D.C. region at 34.5 minutes. The greater New York region had the nation's longest commute at 34.9 minutes.
The national average is 25.5 minutes.
In addition, the report states that 27 percent of the workers in the District of Columbia itself have one-way commutes of an hour or more.
The report found a strong correlation between long commute times and a region's reliance on public transportation.
If your commute's only 34.5 or 34.9 minutes long, be grateful. The Washington Post has a story Tuesday about the growing class of "mega-commuters" -- people who travel at least 50 miles and 90 minutes to their jobs.
And even in this category, Washingtonians could have it (a little bit) worse:
About 600,000 Americans endure such an extreme commute, and more than a quarter of them live in the Washington area. Almost 4 percent of the region’s workers are mega-commuters, up from 3.5 percent in 2000, according to census data. That proportion is rivaled by workers in New York City and surpassed, just barely, only by San Francisco.
Why are the commutes so long? According to the Post, it's at least partly because of the proliferation of two-income households.
“Washington is rich not because there’s a guy in most households making a lot of money,” Akash Jayaprakash, a commuter who travels some two hours each way told the Post. “It’s because two people in those households are making a lot of money. So what are the odds of living near work? The first question you have to ask yourself is, whose work are you going to live near?”
Need something to read on the train? Here's the Post's whole article about D.C.'s mega-commuters. And here's the Census Bureau report on long distance commuters.
And by now you're probably tired of thinking about transportation, so here are some pictures of cute animals:
