I have a confession: I miss rush hour. Living in Los Angeles, I had come to depend on that twice-daily swell of traffic like the sunrise and sunset of my freeway-centered life. Before the pandemic, traffic in most U.S. cities followed a similar pattern: a peak around 6 a.m. and another, slightly higher one around 5 p.m. But now, the number of drivers on the road increases throughout the day, with a sharp rise in the morning that balloons into a higher peak in the evening. In many places, this has resulted in worse afternoon traffic than before the pandemic.

Source: New York Times August 11, 2021 12:45 UTC