After Hurricane Sandy there was no question that New Yorkers found themselves with much, much longer commutes. But just how much longer? NYU's Rudin Center has tried to figure that out. Spoiler alert? Cyclists made it through the post-Sandy Frankenshitstorm like nothing ever happened. #BIKENYC FTW.
How bad your commute got after the storm depended greatly on where you were coming from. The largest differences were in Staten Island, where average commute times almost tripled from 84 to 240 minutes and Brooklyn, where they more than doubled from 42 to 86 minutes. Queens actually came out the best of the boroughs with commute times that barely budged from 45 minutes to 47 minutes. And in the middle came Manhattan (29 minutes to 52 minutes) and the Bronx (41 minutes to 63 minutes).
But the real winners, especially in terms of self-reported frustration levels, were the walkers and the bikers who, in the days after the storm, "had the fewest delays in their commutes, as they were only 9 minutes longer than their usual commute."
Meanwhile, the storm was surprisingly frustrating for telecommuters, according to the study. The pajama-set "ranked their level of frustration on a similar level as transit commuters, 3.7 to 3.8, perhaps due to communications difficulties of connecting to work." We wonder how much cabin fever played into that frustration as well?
Just imagine how much better everyone's commute would have been if the CitiBike share program had launched as planned!
