The USA's Longest Commutes

The average American will spend over one year of their life commuting to work. The average American spends 408 days commuting to and from their workplace. You can find out how long people in your town take commuting to work on this new interactive map.

EducatedDriver.org has worked out how many days people across the United States spend commuting to and from work over the course of their lives. The Average Commute Time interactive maps shows the average time spent commuting in nearly 1,000 locations across the United States. The amount of time spent commuting is shown by colored map markers. The colors of the circles show the average amount of time spent each day traveling back and forth from work. The size of the circle represents the number of days lost over a lifetime to the daily commute.


The average commuting time for the residents of Liguori, Missouri is 1.2 minutes. This is quite a lot quicker than the national average. If you want to know what the average commuting time is in your zipcode area then you can use Auto Accessories Garage's interactive map of Average Commute Times.

If you enter your commute time and zipcode into the map you find out how your commuting time compares with that of your neighbors. You can also discover how your commute compares to the average in your city, state and in the whole country. The Average Commute Times map uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau.


A couple of years ago Mark Evans used the Google Maps API to create a hypnotic visualization of commuting flows, showing the distances and 'journeys' that American's make to and from work. Using the ACS Commute Map you can zoom in on any U.S. county and view an animated map showing where people live and work.

Mark Evans' maps don't show the actual journeys that commuters make but do give a great sense of how town and city centers suck in commuters from surrounding suburbs. The data for the maps comes from the American Community Survey. You can learn more about how the map was made from this data on Mark's blog post ACS Commuter Data Visualizations. Mark's ACS Commute Map was originally inspired by Alasdair Rae's mapped visualizations of commuting in the Bay Area.