SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – One of the only positives of the 2020-2024 time here in the Bay Area was the calm commutes.
You could get from the East Bay into the city in 45 minutes!
Now, a new study shows those quiet commutes are long gone. In fact, San Francisco has received its commute ranking relative to other major cities, and the results aren’t pretty.
The latest TomTom Traffic Index, which analyzes billions of miles of anonymized trip data, shows San Francisco drivers spent the equivalent of about five full days per year stuck in rush-hour delay in 2025.
The headline numbers (San Francisco, 2025)
TomTom’s San Francisco city report for 2025 found:
- 116 hours of time lost to traffic during rush hour (up 10 hours 13 minutes from 2024).
- An average congestion level of 49.7%, up 2.2 percentage points year over year.
- A 10 km (about 6.2 miles) trip averaged 29 minutes 42 seconds, 1 minute 48 seconds longer than in 2024.
- Worst day to travel: Saturday, December 20, when congestion spiked sharply. Probably holiday traffic!
In TomTom’s city-center snapshot inside its 2026 Traffic Index ebook, San Francisco also shows 112 hours of “extra time lost” in rush hour (up 9 hours 52 minutes from 2024), a reminder that the exact headline can vary depending on whether you’re looking at “city,” “metro,” or “city center” cuts of the data.
Nationally, those delays put San Francisco near the top tier of U.S. misery — Axios’ summary of the index lists San Francisco at 116 hours, behind New York City (125 hours).
That gives us the second worst traffic in the nation.
Why So Bad?
What happened? For starters, remote work ended. That means more people are going back to the office, at least for a few days each week.
Life in the city is also returning to normal. I go there every week, and streets are busy again. Restaurant are opening. People are coming downtown for reasons other than work, which adds to the traffic.
There’s also been lots of development in the far-reaching suburbs of San Francisco over the last few years. That means more people need to drive a longer distance to get into the city.
MTC’s Vital Signs tracker notes that transit commutes are longer in part because nearly two-thirds of transit commuters work in San Francisco but live elsewhere.
What to Do?
What can you–a lowly individual commuter–do about this traffic nightmare?
Several things. The data clearly shows that Tuesdays to Thursdays are the worst traffic days, since those are the “core days” when many companies require all their staff to come to the office.
If you can shift to working Monday or Friday, your commute will be way shorter.
You can also opt to carpool. With the demise of clean air stickers, the 3-person carpool lanes on bridges into San Francisco have never saved more time. But you actually need 3 people in the car to use them now–not just a fancy EV!
And failing that, there’s always BART. I take it every week, and it’s better now in almost every way than it was in 2019.
If you haven’t taken the train since before the remote work era, perhaps now is the time to start.
