51 minutes
Tetra Images/Brand X Pictures/Getty Images. At an nationwide average drive-time of about 24.3 minutes, Americans now spend more than 100 hours a year commuting to work, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Yes, that's more than the average two weeks of vacation time (80 hours) taken by many workers during a year. More. The average American’s commute to work is 25.5 minutes each way, according to a report in USA Today. That’s about 51 minutes a day getting to and from work, or about 204 hours a year spent commuting. As an example of how much conditions vary, average commute times range from 19 minutes for people who work in towns to 34 minutes for people who work in big cities. And where people say the traffic is OK, it's 24 minutes; where poor, it's 32. Views of traffic conditions over time have been unstable. Workers putting less than 40 hours on the clock each week travel an average of 34.0 minutes to and from work in a typical day, much lower than the average 48.4 minutes among those who work at least 40 hours each week. Based on a ranking of states with the longest average commute-to-work times, the ACS showed that New York (30.4 minutes) and Maryland (30.2 minutes) residents spent the most time traveling to their jobs. Chart by author; data provided by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Overall, Americans spend a lot of time in their car commuting to work each day. The 2013 American Community Survey found that the average commute to work was 25.8 minutes, which is up from 21.7 minutes in 1980. According to a study done by the Harvard Health Watch, an average American spends 101 minutes per day driving. That means that in a lifetime, an average Joe spends a whopping 37,935 hours driving a car (assuming that s/he starts driving at 17 and drives until 78.7 years old).
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/censusandstatistics/a/commutetimes.htm http://time.com/9912/10-things-your-commute-does-to-your-body/ http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Traffic/Story?id=485098&page=1 http://www.gallup.com/poll/28504/Workers-Average-Commute-RoundTrip-Minutes-Typical-Day.aspx http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/censusandstatistics/a/commutetimes.htm http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/25/the-average-american-drives-this-much-each-year-ho.aspx http://blog.tempo.io/2013/7-time-consuming-things-an-average-joe-spends-in-a-lifetime/
how long does the average american drive to work