This New York County Officially Has The Worst Commute In Upstate

Maybe this is a vast generalization, but I don’t think anybody’s commute to work and back is their favorite part of the day. Yeah, you get time with the radio or your favorite podcast or a new audiobook, but that drive is still considered time wasted by a lot of people. It’s one of the main reasons why working from home was so popular during COVID lockdown.

Now that “business as usual” has returned, for the most part, so has the commute. Ask anyone outside of the state, and they’d probably name New York as one of the worst commuter states. Sure this generalization is based largely off NYC, but it turns out one Upstate county has a commute almost as bad as in the heart of Manhattan.

What County Has Upstate New York's Longest Commute?

Data aggregate Stacker has compiled a top 50 of New York’s worst commuter counties from post-lockdown data. If you had to guess which Upstate county had the worst commute, who would you guess? Onondaga? Albany? Nope, they don’t even crack the top 50. Schenectady? Rensselaer? Warren? 41, 31, 43.

Excluding Downstate, the City, and Long Island as one mass, the Capital Region’s Schoharie County has the worst commute in New York. The average Schoharie commuter spends 30.7 minutes on the road every morning and then again in the afternoon. That’s only 90 seconds off the average Manhattan commute.

A Big Argument For A Comfortable Car

Counting 260 working days in a year, that means Schoharians spend 11 days per year to and from work. Stacker says almost 15% of county residents have a commute longer than an hour, 20% leave for work before 6am, and 43% work outside Schoharie County lines.

All in all, Schoharie boasts (though maybe that’s not the best phrase) the thirteenth worst commute in all of New York state, though they're far off the top spot. For the record, Bronx workers unsurprisingly have the state’s longest commute at 45.3 minutes.