Pasco County residents take longer to get to work in the morning than their neighbors in Hillsborough County.
That’s according to numbers provided by the U.S. Census Bureau on its Census Explorer Map. Using 2012 data, the Census Bureau determined that the average Pasco County driver spends 30 minutes on the road commuting to work, compared to 26 minutes for residents living in Hillsborough County.
Those numbers are unchanged from more than a decade ago, but are quite different from the commute times tracked in 1990. Then, the average Pasco resident needed 24 minutes to get to work in the morning, while Hillsborough was just slightly less at 22 minutes. It shows a fundamental shift in where Pasco residents are choosing to work over the past nearly 25 years, as many continue to drive outside the county to collect their paycheck.
The counties with the longest commute, however, are not in Pinellas County (23 minutes) or even in South Florida (25 to 29 minutes). Instead, it’s to the north in Gilchrist and Clay counties, were the average commute is 32 minutes. But even in 1990, it took a while to travel those two counties, which are home to towns like Trenton and Orange Park. According to the Census, the commute times a quarter century ago were 28 minutes each, beaten only by Liberty County in the Panhandle at the time.
At 30 minutes a day, that means the average Pasco County worker spends 125 hours each year behind the wheel, or three full work weeks, and a little bit of overtime.
Florida drivers on average spend 26 minutes commuting to work, compared to 22 minutes in 1990. New York and Maryland have the worst commute times in the country at 32 minutes, while North Dakota has the best with 17 minutes.
