Not to Jinx It, but Is the Commute Easier Lately?

Earlier this year, Maralee Sanders suddenly realized something was different in her commute: she was getting to work earlier than expected.

Before the pandemic, Ms. Sanders’s 20-mile rush-hour drive from her home in Bound Brook, in north-central New Jersey, to her office in Short Hills would average, on a good day, 40 minutes each way.

“There’s always some sort of construction, heavy traffic, and lots of jostling on the roads,” said Ms. Sanders, who works in the human resources department at a law firm. “You have to be very patient to drive in New Jersey.”

But now and then, she found that she was shaving anywhere between 10 and 15 minutes off her trip to the office. She sensed she was battling fewer cars on the road. And then it hit her. It was Mondays and Fridays when the commute was so much easier.

Ms. Sanders, 40, recently shocked her firm’s summer interns when she mentioned she could almost always be found in the office on Fridays. “It’s become my most reliable office day, because my drive now is that much easier.”

Ms. Sanders is hardly alone in her quest for a Zen commute. On average, drivers in the New York metropolitan area lose about 132 hours per year in traffic, according to a recent survey by CoPilot, a car-buying app. And it’s not much better for those who rely on public transportation in the region; they have the nation’s longest commute, at an average of 58 minutes, according to Moovit, a transit software and data firm.

Laura Gorman, a financial adviser who is required to come into the office three days a week, regularly takes the Long Island Rail Road from East Northport to Grand Central Station on Mondays. And it has been — well, not that bad.

“You’re guaranteed a seat,” said Ms. Gorman, 49. “Every car is less crowded on a Monday.” Even the new boondoggle of a transfer at Jamaica Terminal, where commuters have endured a punishing mob trying to catch connecting trains, is, according to Ms. Gorman, “still terrible but tolerable” at the start of the workweek. “Don’t get me wrong,” she added. “The cluster-mess is still there, but it is more manageable.”

The numbers bear this out. According to to publicly available data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Monday is now the easiest weekday to travel around the metro region. That is when ridership on city subways and the L.I.R.R. was lightest, followed by Fridays through the end of June this year.

Similarly, average daily westbound traffic on the Long Island Expressway near the Queens border was usually the lightest on Mondays through May of this year, according to Stephen Canzoneri, a spokesman for the State Department of Transportation. Metro-North trains clocked in fewer riders mostly on Fridays through the end of June.

This reflects the typical schedule of hybrid workers, who mostly are in city offices between Tuesday and Thursday, according to Kastle Systems, a property management firm.

For Kelly Aaron, the chief executive of a lighting company, the quiet Monday morning commute on the 9:05 from Ridgewood, N.J., to Pennsylvania Station helps her get organized for work.

Overall, New Jersey Transit trains on Mondays and Fridays are about 20 to 30 percent below midweek ridership this year, according to James Smith, director of media relations at New Jersey Transit.

Ms. Aaron said she has been able to easily grab a seat with her husband, Josh Aaron, and the two, who jointly own Blueprint Lighting, now prepare for their weekly staff meeting as they head toward their office near Bryant Park in Manhattan. And the train is quieter, too, allowing Ms. Aaron to rely less on her noise-canceling headphones.

“Hard to believe,” she said, “but Mondays on the train is like my mobile conference room,” she said.

Before the pandemic, Serena Truscio, an account manager for a fabric distributor, would budget up to two hours to drive into Manhattan from her home in Dumont, N.J.

Now her drive into the city is usually a little over an hour, especially on a Monday. “My life is a whole lot better when you can get in and out of the city quickly,” she said.

Alas, experts suggest that the humane commute is fleeting. Easier mobility on the roads and trains will gradually disappear in the New York area, according to Mark Burfeind, the communications director at INRIX, a transportation analytics provider. As more companies mandate their workers to return to the office four days a week, he said, the daily slog will creep back into commuters’ lives.

“You’ll likely see this happen quicker in New York, as it has a wide variety of industries where hybrid work models don’t work too well,” when compared with other cities like San Francisco, where tech firms dominate and hybrid work models will most likely prevail longer.

No one is eager for a return to the past, but Ms. Sanders did note a minor downside to a shorter commute: “I can’t finish a podcast episode anymore because I get to work that much faster.”