Here are some of the key highlights:

• In 2023, Atlanta saw the 6^th-largest decrease in reported travel time (one-way minutes) among cities in the region compared to 2022. Commute time in the city was 4% shorter in 2023 than in the previous year — 1.2 minutes less each way, which translated to about 10 hours saved in one year.

• Also, the percentage of employees working from home in Atlanta dipped from 29.8 in 2022 to 25.5 in 2023.

• Within the Southern U.S. region, Garland commuters reported the longest travel time to work (31 minutes), followed by Cape Coral and Washington, D.C.

Recently, we looked at how commute times had changed across the 50 largest cities in the U.S. since the workforce distribution has become more hybrid than remote. In doing so, we found that, nationwide, the expected correlation between remote work and commute trends was not as strong or as consistent as it was in 2020 and 2021.

Now, we turn to the same American communities survey data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau (see the methodology section below for more details), but focus our analysis on the largest cities in the Southern U.S. region to see how commute times have fluctuated across the American South in recent years, as well as what trends the distribution between remote and non-remote workers followed during that same time.

Southern U.S. Commute Times Tick Up Year-over-Year

Across the 42 Southern U.S. cities included in our analysis, the mean one-way commute in 2023 was 25 minutes — a slight uptick from the reported travel time to work of 24.7 minutes in 2022. Although a small increment on its own, this adds up to roughly two more hours spent traveling between home and work by one Southern U.S. worker commuting in 2023 as compared to the year before.

For the full study visit www.commercialcafe.com