Rush hour is over in the Bay Area. Welcome to the era of permanent traffic (2025)

DavidLovato remembers, in painfully stark detail, the night he hit his misery point with Bay Area traffic.

It was 7:30 p.m. on a Wednesday last October, well after what would traditionally be called “rush hour.” Lovato caught a shuttle bus from his company in Mountain View, thinking he would zip up Highway 101 to San Francisco.

Instead, the bus spent 90 minutes plodding through gridlock that Lovato found mystifying.

“We crawled past Palo Alto, Redwood City and San Francisco International Airport,” he said. There was no sign of a car crash, a lane closure or a concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre. Peak commute hours were supposedly over. So where were all these drivers going?

Such questions have perplexed transportation experts in the Bay Area, many of whom observe a similar shift in traffic patterns— on freeways as well as public transportation. Rush hour, it seems, has transformed in an era of hybrid work. Workers who returned to the office three days a week have found they are no longer tethered to their desks from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. As a result, they come late, leave early, drive off to play pickleball during lunch, drive at night to grab a late dinner. Flexible schedules have upended the old paradigm of a morning and evening commute.

“Now it’s all day long,” said Adeline Ho of San Jose, who drove to San Francisco at noon for a tech conference last Thursday. Like other motorists, she has noticed the Bay Area becoming more like Los Angeles, where people are habituated to sitting and waiting on choked freeways.

What many commuters now experience is a more compressed “peak”— near bridge toll plazas on weekday mornings, or on a packed Tuesday evening BART train— and traffic interspersed throughout the day. Overall, transit is suffering while driving has rebounded: data from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission shows that on Wednesdays at 9 a.m., the number of Bay Bridge crossings now exceeds 2019 levels, with a strong recovery at other hours.

On the roads, it feels like Bay Area traffic has reached a stage of permanent nuisance. It’s relentless but unpredictable, swelling at random times. Still, the jams are not bad enough to nudge more people onto mass transit.

“People who commute, we’re Type A— we like to control things,” Donise Lewis of Oakland said as she walked out of a parking garage in downtown San Francisco. Despite the erratic nature of traffic, a driver “can still be in control.”

The new normal has created obvious challenges for public transportation systems like BART, which were built to accommodate a 6-to-10 a.m. and 3-to-7p.m. daily rhythm of travel into the city’s downtown corridor. Officials at BART have tried, valiantly, to adapt.

One person who observed the rush-hour evolution early on was John FitzGibbon, BART’s manager of scheduling and planning. In September 2023, he devised a plan to reconfigure the rail system’s schedule, boosting service on nights and weekends and on the yellow line from Pittsburg/Baypoint— where rush hour crowds were most concentrated.

Since then, BART has seen riders gradually return on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with a higher share of trips happening in the middle of the day than before the pandemic. That could be people running errands, or heading to the office at unconventional hours, agency spokesperson Alicia Trost suggested.

By last year, officials at BART and other transit agencies had grimly accepted the three-day work week, realizing there was little they could do to restore lost fare revenue on Monday and Friday. Labor contracts and the logistics of balancing a rail fleet prevent BART from more drastically reimagining its schedule, FitzGibbon said.

Even the 2023 service changes haven’t lured back Lewis, who used to ride BART and now drives almost exclusively.

“I come to the city less often,” she said, adding that she has become strategic, relying on navigation apps to find the secret routes — and small windows of time — with less congestion.

Other commuters struggle to acclimate to Los Angeles-style traffic.

“There’s still a rush hour, but the edges have been smeared into other parts of the schedule,” said Geoffrey Fowler of Oakland, who rides a motorcycle to work in Hayward. He said many of his co-workers arrive at 5 a.m. and try to leave by 1 p.m. “to make their drives a little more tolerable.”

Stanford University economics professor Nicholas Bloom, who has extensively studied the ramifications of the three-day work week, said he’s not surprised to see a staggered rush hour.

Companies’ return-to-office policies “almost never stipulate” a daily schedule, so many workers arrive and depart at their convenience, Bloom said. Some attend meetings virtually from their kitchens in the morning, head to the office later, leave in time to pick their kids up from school and sign on again at night.

Technology platforms like Zoom and Slack have dissolved the barriers between work and home while enabling a new kind of lifestyle, said Abby Raisz, research director at the Bay Area Council business association.

“There needs to be substantial benefit to bringing people in” to the office, Raisz said. She cited recent surveys the council conducted that explain people’s reluctance to come back five days a week. Consistently, people point to the number of hours they waste commuting.

But a lot of the people who aren’t driving to an office or transit stop at 8 a.m. are still driving throughout the day. On sunny afternoons, Highway 13 in Berkeley snarls with day-trippers, said Eisso Mansvelt Beck, who has biked along that route to Joaquin Miller Park in Oakland.

Because work schedules are more elastic, people mix leisure activities into their day and spend more hours on the computer at night, Bloom said, referring to productivity data from Microsoft. Many workers leave their desks to play golf or hit the gym. Grocery stores that historically teemed with shoppers on Saturday mornings are reporting surges on weekdays as well. Among them is the Safeway on Jackson Street in San Francisco’s Financial District, which had long lines last Tuesday evening, said Danny Snyder, a worker at the Exploratorium who stopped at the store on his way home.

All of these changes in behavior put more cars on the road at different times of day. Many people have simply adjusted their expectations. Nicolas Capera, who takes calls from home in Berkeley before driving to a job in San Leandro, said he has grown accustomed to the mid-morning slog on Interstate 880. He can’t really remember what conditions were like beforeCOVID.

Bloom wonders whether the whole idea of rush hour may become obsolete in 10 years anyway, if everyone has self-driving cars and traffic becomes significantly more efficient.

Not everyone embraces that vision of the future. Lovato, who doesn’t own a car, converted to public transit after experiencing that late-evening jam in October. Ever since then, he has takenCaltrain to work, biking to and from stations to get exercise in between. He pities people who default to driving.

Chronicle staff writer Nami Sumida contributed to this report.

Reach Rachel Swan: rswan@sfchronicle.com