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When Marjorie Crosbie drove to pick up her daughter from an after-school program on a recent afternoon, the 10-mile round trip from her home in a suburb of Tampa, Fla., took 45 minutes—twice as long as it used to.
Such slogs have become a familiar headache at this stage of the pandemic, said Ms. Crosbie, 50 years old, a senior finance manager at PwC. Like many of her neighbors in Odessa, she still works from home full time, making it easy to pop out for errands.
The Covid-19 pandemic continues to scramble driving patterns throughout the U.S. Morning traffic is below pre-pandemic levels in most places, as many people continue to work from home. Afternoon traffic, however, has come roaring back—and now is heavier in many places than it was before Covid-19, according to transportation analytics company Inrix.
In more than 40 of the 100 biggest U.S. metros, roads are more congested on weekday afternoons than they were pre-pandemic, likely due to an uptick in shopping and leisure-type trips, as well as deliveries. The company compared car counts from the first half of April with those in January and February 2020, and then adjusted for seasonal variations.
An expanded version of this article appears on WSJ.com.
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