Highway photo by kimi lee on unsplash.com

While there are the common gripes about living in Fresno, bad traffic is generally not one of them.

Fresno’s morning and evening commutes can be frustrating with break lights and backed up onramps, but it’s nothing compared to bigger cities. And that observation is borne out by a new study of U.S. locations where commuters lost the most time in rush hour traffic.

Conducted by retail auto information website CoPilot, the study finds Fresno at No. 34 of 80 U.S. metros for lost commute time, with an extra 16.4 minutes of wheel time daily — 6.4 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the evening.

That’s slightly above the U.S. average of 14.4 minutes. Taken over a year, Fresno drivers spend 68.2 extra hours on commute time, compared to 60.2 hours nationwide. CoPilot also tracked the percentage of commuters using private transportation. In Fresno, 94.7% of commuters use cars to get to work.

The top three cities that lost the most time in rush hour traffic are New York at No. 1 with 31.7 minutes, followed by Los Angeles at 29.6 minutes and Honolulu with 28 minutes.

The bottom three with the shortest amount of extra time spent commuting at rush hour is Greensboro, North Carolina with 6.2 minutes at No. 80, preceded by Syracuse, New York, at 7.2 minutes and Akron, Ohio, at 7.8 minutes.

Using Census information and real-time traffic data from location technology provider TomTom, the study found that after several years of rising average commute times in the U.S., it has fallen since the pandemic.

“As millions of workers transitioned to working from home during the pandemic, traffic conditions improved considerably,” according to the CoPilot study. “As a result, the average commute time decreased for those people who did continue commuting for the first time in recent history. After rising steadily since 2010, the average commute time dipped to 26.9 minutes in 2020 and then dropped again to 25.6 minutes in 2021. In 2019, prior to the pandemic, the average commute time was 27.6 minutes. Over the course of a year, on average, workers saved nearly 17 hours in commute time due to this decline.”