A new census report found that the commute time to work in the New York-Tri State area is the second longest in the United States at 31.3 minutes on average.
The census released its 2010 data on commuters on Thursday, which said the average commute to work across the United States is 25.3 minutes. The average commute time in 2009 was 25.1 minutes.
Since the agency started collecting such data in 1980, when the average travel time was just under 22 minutes, commute times have slowly increased.
On average, Americans leave home for their workplaces between 7:30 a.m. and 7:59 a.m.
The longest commute in America belongs to the Maryland-Washington D.C. area, where workers took an average of 31.8 minutes to get to their jobs.
Maryland also “had the second highest percentage of workers with jobs outside their county of residence” behind Virginia, also near Washington D.C., according to a census press release about the report.
North and South Dakota both had the shortest commute times, with 16.1 minutes and 16.8 minutes, respectively.
The census, in its 2009 data also released on Thursday, said the majority of workers in the New York area used public transportation, rather than driving. By a long shot, the San Francisco Bay Area came in second in terms of public transportation use, followed by Washington D.C.
However, most Americans, or 76.1 percent, drove by themselves to get to work and back. That percentage has increased slightly since 2009, according to the data. Only 5 percent of Americans used public transportation.
Foreign-born workers had longer mean commute times than those born in the United States, according the the census, "28.1 minutes for foreign-born workers compared with 24.9 minutes for those who were native-born."
On average, 2.9 percent walked to work and 0.6 percent bicycled. Around 4.3 percent worked at home, said the report.
