I've spent 4-5 hours driving every single day this week. On Monday it took me 2 hours to get home from Huntsville. Today it took 1.5 hours to drive to Conroe.

Noticed that this week as well.

610 South usually lets up once you get past the Galleria/59 but it's been gridlock all the way to SPO lately.

Glad I don't have to experience that often.

Holidays

Traffic is always worse around this time of year.

Freaking horrible. I loved the fact the non essentials were told to stay home. Made my drive into downtown enjoyable.

I wonder if this is partially due to the extended bridge from 59 south dropping onto 610s just before Bellaire that they build during covid. Also seems like way more people are getting on 610 from Bellaire than in the past. Maybe new routes by people to avoid the construction mess at 288 and 610 from the Med Center?

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Maybe new routes by people to avoid the construction mess at 288 and 610 from the Med Center?

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That's finished.

no idea. Could be a holiday thing as it has definitely worsened over the past few weeks.

I might just have gridlock amnesia regarding previous years.

Montgomery county is one of the top 5(10?) fastest growing counties in the country. We have massive amounts of people moving here

Diggity said:

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no idea. Could be a holiday thing as it has definitely worsened over the past few weeks.

I might just have gridlock amnesia regarding previous years.

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And maybe I have amnesia about it as well but it feels like people are even worse drivers now.

Of course, there's been an exponential increase in ****ty driving since the advent of smart phones.

Serotonin said:

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100,000-200,000 people moving here every year

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This! And less work from home bums. That nonsense needs to go away

TarponChaser said:

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And maybe I have amnesia about it as well but it feels like people are even worse drivers now.

Of course, there's been an exponential increase in ****ty driving since the advent of smart phones.

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This is absolutely true. It's everywhere. Going down WLH to BW8 at 6am is a battle royale with the bro-dozers.

Ags #1 said:

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No way it's as bad as pre covid. Just went back in nov 1st after 4.5 years remote. It's not pleasant but not as bad as 2019.

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Depends where you're headed. I can easily measure a couple "short" road trips that have gotten longer due to people building further out.

Driving out to Liberty County this past Wednesday, for instance, was maybe an hour longer than on the weekend, and noticeably longer than when I first started making that drive. And you can easily see the construction of new homes and gas stations in places that were pretty sparse 10 years ago.

I think Covid/WFH got more people comfortable with longer commutes. When schools were "distance learning," I knew people that just made their weekend home their full-time home, since they were basically home schooling anyway.

I did work-from-home consulting for years before Covid, and the days of knowing the best time to run errands or whatever came to an abrupt end in 2020.

It doesn't seem like HPD ever went back to pre-covid traffic enforcement either. I used to know spots all over to slow down and watch for cruisers sitting on the shoulder, and have never seen traffic stops get back like that. I think that contributes to some of the wilder driving and paper plate Nisaan specials.

Probably so, I was just comparing my commute into downtown from sienna to middle downtown. Feel like it was much worse, especially the drive home, before covid. But maybe 4.5 years of not doing it has me off

My commute has been about 15-20 minutes longer over the last 6 months or so. Seemingly happened out of nowhere.

People have moved farther out, and that requires for them to drive in for work.

We're probably past the point of construction delays in other counties backing up commuter traffic in the city.

Google timeplapse tells the story. Like for the South Post Oak jam up that Diggity mentioned, you can see the development down around BW8 and Texas Parkway.

https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/. And that only goes up to 2022, apparently.

I thought a tollway down SPO was a great idea, but NIMBY's won out.

We also still have ****ty chokepoint interchanges like I-10/90 East from the Loop that just aren't designed for the capacity they're now serving.

Holiday traffic. People are not going straight home after work. They are making a couple of stops on the way home to shop. Give it a few more weeks.

That said company goes full time in the office in January.

Matsui said:

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and the work from home people are now out and about driving around running errands all day

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100% this. They are "working" from home. It's why productivity is so much lower now than before.

1876er said:

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I constantly meet people that work from home or only go in 2-3 days a week, but somehow traffic is just as bad or possibly worse than pre COVID when everybody went in to the office everyday. How is this possible?

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I have been wondering the exact same for a while. Seems like it really got even more noticeably worse in the last 6mo or so. Thank God I only have to come in 2 days a wk to central Houston from Cypress. No way i could do 5 days of this, every week.

6 months is right about when I noticed it. My drive to work is consistently 15-20 minutes longer than it was at the beginning of the year.

facts

Been in Katy 15 years as of today

Commute time is up 50% to 60% since then