Give enough time and almost any conversation in Los Angeles between friends or strangers alike leads to a bitch session about commuting. Most of us feel like we spend hours daily traversing our city’s auto-cholesterol clogged arteries to and from work, whether it’s across the 5, 10, 110, 405, 118, 210, or 101. But a lot of what we say versus what we actually experience is a malleable memory shaped mostly by the worst of traffic.
John Keefe, Steven Melendez and Louise Ma of the WNYC Data News Team took U.S. Census Bureau data and constructed a Pepto-Bismol hued interactive map to offer a more definitive and exact measurement of the average travel time to work across the United States categorized by zip code. Hover over any section of the map and the numerical display will change to reflect each grueling minute (+/- a minute or two) between walking out the door and arriving to work on average for residents of neighborhoods.
For reference, the average commute to work in the United States is 25.4 minutes while the commute times these neighborhoods are:
Santa Monica 90401 - 26.1 minutes
South LA 90062 - 35 minutes
Hancock Park 90004 - 31.9 minutes
Westwood 90024 - 21.7 minutes
Pasadena 91101 - 25.2 minutes
Culver City 90232 - 24.1 minutes
Sherman Oaks 91403 - 31.7
Porter Ranch - 91326 - 32.4
So the next time someone tries to one up you about the trials and tribulations of their daily commute, you can now punch in your zip codes and compare with less subjective data (hint: nobody wins).
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