Is traffic less on friday or saturday?

I commute to work at roughly the same each day and have noticed a significant and consistent drop in traffic on Fridays. If I were to guess I would say the roadways are 20-30 percent lighter in the mornings between 8 and 9. This is on a major thoroughfare in the Boston suburbs (Route 2 East) going into the city and is consistent enough to be predictable.

Is this a common phenomenon or just some local statistical blip? First thoughts: Lots of people have 4 day work weeks? College students don't have classes on Friday?

I really have no idea. I experience the same thing in NJ (and I love it - it makes my commute a tad more tolerable if I can look forward to less stress on Friday mornings). When I take a day off, I always take a Friday to make a three day weekend.

I think a lot of people do the same thing. A lot of people I know work from home one day a week and Friday is a popular one for that. I just wanted to chime in to say I do not believe this local to just you, this happens where I live also.

I commute from Raleigh, NC to Chapel Hill 5 days a week and M-Th it takes often more than 45 minutes to get where I am going but on Friday I can often get there in under 30 minutes. And YET...the Friday drive home at 5 seems more congested than ever! I take the Mass Pike westbound to work, and I haven't noticed this at all.

4 day work weeks or 9/80 schedules where you get every other Friday off. When you do a 9/80 your Friday at work is also an 8 hour day instead of 9, so people might be coming in at different times than normal. At my workplace approximately 15-20% of people work from home on Fridays, logged in remotely via Citrix.

It's a good way of keeping a happy workforce. People have a day less commuting, and their weekend starts earlier because they don't have the journey home. Like essexjan, most people in my workplace work at home on Fridays via Citrix.

(Actually, at my workplace, about 1/3 people work at home on Mon, Wed, Fridays, and the rest - like me - work at home 100% but I am super-lucky). If you go into my workplace on a Friday there are like, two people there. I take the train to work.

The train station parking lot, and the train itself, are also less crowded on Fridays. I'm sure it's not just a timing difference where people are going in later, because when I go home in the evening, there aren't cars parked in the aisles, on the grass, on the pedestrian walkways, like there are every other day of the week. The office I work at is also somewhat deserted today (Friday).

We don't have 4-day work weeks or 9/80 schedules at this time of year. What seems to happen is if people are going to take a single day off, it's going to be a Friday (or, less popularly, a Monday) so they can have a long weekend. Road traffic does indeed seem to be far worse on Friday evenings, though, both in the city where I work, and in the suburbs where I live.

It seems to be the one day of the week when everyone wants to leave work on time. Fridays before long weekends are particularly hellish. We too have a lot of people either doing a compressed work week (4 days x 9 1/2 hours) or just doing a shorted week (4 days x 7 1/2 hours).

Mondays and Fridays are the most popular days to take off, of course. There are even a few people doing highly compressed weeks: 3 days x 12 hours on a rotating schedule so that there's 7 day coverage (in two shifts) in certain high-availability labs. They get paid extra for having weird schedules, even.

Friday also seems like the most common day for people to take off for leisure reasons, which should have some impact in the aggregate. I know people who also seem more likely to get "sick" on a Friday (or Monday, or rainy day). Not only does just about my entire company work from home on Friday, but we recently started reaching a critical mass where people who don't care about working from home do so anyway, because the office itself is a ghost town.

In fact, I'm typing this from my sofa, while some work compiles. It also depends on where you live. Afternoon traffic during summers in Minneapolis-St. Paul is a bit heavier because a lot of people have cabins outside the metro area.

True they might take Friday off (at least a half day), but they've replaced commuting to work with an SUV hauling a boat to the lake. I'm with ejazen (I live between DC and Baltimore) and the mornings are light, but the drive home is probably the longest on a friday. I blame all the people playing hooky trying to get a jump on the weekend festivities... come on!

You already had the day off, wait until rush hour is over... I'm wearing work pants here! Same here in Denver. Traffic is great for me on Fridays, but I don't take the freeways.

I have noticed that the busiest traffic shifts an hour earlier--probably because people are most likely to leave early on Fridays. In the winter we usually have to eat lunch within walking distance or at the cafeteria because if we drive anywhere there will be no place to park when we get back. On Fridays, it's never a problem so my co-workers and I always think of Fridays as fun lunch day.

At my workplace we usually schedule half a day for everyone in the team, except for one who covers in the afternoon. This allows people to take care of weekday personal business, and get the weekends started a little early. This means that the Friday afternoon drive home is a little easier for the rest of us, who work all day.

On the Friday prior to the start of hunting season, on Saturday, there is always a traffic jam in the afternoon on the way out of town (Houston), as people are rushing to their hunting leases. My evening commute homeward homeward takes me toward the city, and it is longest on Friday's. Jeremias writes "I just had no idea the numbers of people in this category would be so large.

Like paanta said when a road is loaded to capacity or over capacity a very small difference in the number of cars traveling the road can make a huge difference in how well it flows. A couple of percentage points can mean the difference between well flowing freeway and grid lock. « Older Good ways for a US citizen to ... | This thread is closed to new comments.

Very affordable commuter/road bike?