Think Traffic In Peabody Is Getting Worse? So Does U.S. Census

PEABODY, MA -- Molly Monroe and her fiance love their south Peabody home, but they're still considering moving. Traffic is getting so bad that during back ups, a trip that usually takes four or five minutes can take as long as 20.

"It’s absolutely enough to make us move in the next couple of years. We have friends come to visit and they can’t believe it," Monroe said,

According to data the Census bureau released Thursday, Peabody residents had commute times to work of 26.3 minutes in 2016. While that was down 24 seconds in 2015, the overall trends has been for longer commutes: in 2011, the average Peabody commuter's trip to and from work was 25.2 minutes.

That extra 1 minute, 6 seconds on your drive to work might not seem like much, but consider two trips a day, five work days per week and 50 work weeks in a year. That 1:06 means Peabody commuters are spending an extra 550 minutes -- or 9.2 hours -- per year in traffic than they were five years ago.

And Peabody residents aren't alone when it comes to spending time in the car. In Massachusetts, average commute times were 29 minutes in 2016, up 2.83% from 2015 and 4.88% since 2010. Nationally, the average commute time was 26.6 minutes in 2016, up from 25.9 minutes in 2015 and 25.2 minutes in 2010.

Last week Peabody Patch asked residents about their commutes, and the response was overwhelmingly similar to what Monroe had to tell us about her husband's drive to work: commutes that used to take 15 minutes now take more than an hour, and people are increasingly turning to back roads and heading to work at odd hours to avoid traffic.

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Patch file photo.

Dave Copeland can be reached at dave.copeland@patch.com or by calling 617-433-7851. Follow him on Twitter (@CopeWrites) and Facebook (/copewrites).