James Burns
Last fall I taught a class in Athens that met two days a week. The 140-mile round trip trek from downtown Atlanta to the University of Georgia campus wasn’t exactly fun. But sorry as I felt for myself, I felt even sorrier for the drivers I would pass on my return to the city, a stream of cars crawling along 78, hitting a bottleneck between Snellville and Loganville. “At least I don’t have that drive every day,” I would think to myself. “It’s got to be one of the worst commutes in Atlanta.”
Well, now there are some stats to confirm that hunch. According to a new study by the consumer finance website NerdWallet, the worst commutes in metro Atlanta are along the 78 corridor, topped by Loganville, Snellville, and Lawrenceville.
The study examined financial costs (gas and insurance) and time wasted (length of commute and congestion). The analysis included all commute drive times, not just trips from the suburbs to downtown Atlanta.
While the average metro-area commute takes 28.7 minutes each way, Loganville residents spend 36.2 minutes driving to and from work—or one hour and 12 minutes daily. “Five of the suburbs that made our top-10 list were in Gwinnett County,” noted researcher John Kuo. “Their rankings were driven by the county’s high gas prices and long commutes.”
The Worst Commutes in Metro Atlanta
(the average time commuters spent traveling each way)
1. Loganville
36.2 minutes
2. Snellville
32.3 minutes
3. Lawrenceville
32.8 minutes
4. Riverdale
29.1 minutes
5. Suwanee
31.8 minutes
6. Woodstock
33.7 minutes
7. Villa Rica
28.74 minutes.
8. Sugar Hill
30.6 minutes
9. Douglasville
30.9 minutes
10. Fayetteville
33.1 minutes
