Adjust Your Traveler’s Drive Times! S.F Is Now the 2nd Most Congested City In The U.S.
There was a time a couple of years back when a traveler to San Francisco could count on getting from San Francisco International Airport to downtown San Francisco in just a little over 30 minutes. This distance is just a little over 15 miles and it is all freeway. Amazingly Google still shows the drive time as 30 minutes but they don’t have their main campus in San Francisco and so Gooble workers probably haven’t been stuck in the freeway crawl shown above.
Both business travelers and vacationers need to take into account S.F.’s rise to become the back office for Silicon Valley and now even home to some of the most famous internet startups. All this means that both S.F. streets and the freeways which connect the city to other parts of the Bay Area now are congested most of the day and into the evening. Once upon a time, no to long ago the task of leaving the core of the Business District to get on the freeway to cross the Bay Bridge or to head south to SFO used to take less than 15 minutes. Nowadays at rush hour, that time to travel only 10 or 20 blocks is now 45 minutes and does not account for accidents or construction created lane closures.
Travelers with a 9AM business meeting downtown should schedule a flight that arrives no later than 7AM. If all goes well, they will board a taxi or Towncar by 7:20 and be in the city by 8:15, maybe 8:30. Travelers to Oakland Airport should count on at least one hour travel time and up to 2 hours at rush hour.
Congestion is even worse further south of San Francisco in Silicon Valley with cars at a crawl for up an hour just to get to a freeway from a tech campus and then just a slow roll for mile after mile. More on this on later post
Not only is congestion is getting worse every year in the United States, in fact, the average US commuter spends 42 hours stuck in traffic a year, according to a report by the Texas Transportation Institute. Congestion is also a big reason why auto and tech companies are pouring money into everything from car-sharing to autonomous driving.
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