How long does it take you to get to work? 5 minutes? 20? 60? More? According to this fascinating interactive map from flowingdata.com, the average commute time in Hennepin County is 22.7 minutes, slightly more than Ramsey County’s 22.6 minutes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of surrounding metro county commute times are longer with suburban drivers making their way into the Twin Cities:
Carver County: 25.6 minutes
Wright County: 30.1 minutes
Sherburne County: 32.0 minutes
Anoka County: 27.9 minutes
Washington County: 25.2 minutes
Dakota County: 24.1 minutes
Scott County: 26.7 minutes
So who has the worst commute times in Minnesota? Isanti County Minnesotans do. The average Isanti County commuter takes 33.2 minutes to get to and from work. That’s over 66 minutes a day, almost 6 hours a week, and almost 24 hours a month. That’s right – the average Isanti County commuter is spending the equivalent of an entire day each month driving to and from work. To look at it another way, if commuters are working 40 hours weeks, the time they spend driving is 60% of a whole work week tacked on each month. That’s a lot of wasted time.
Isanti County, in fact, has the longest average commute time of any county in the Midwest with the exception of Calhoun County on the Illinois/Missouri border.
Curious about commute times across Minnesota, the Midwest, and the entire United States? You can find the interactive map here. Be sure to check out the animation from the New York Times on the bottom, which helps you further visualize county commute times by “racing” cars against each other.
Let us know – how does your commute time differ from your county’s average? Were these averages surprising to you?
Image is a screenshot from the interactive map at flowingdata.com.