You already have your reasons for hating San Francisco. The tech bros. The housing crisis. Twitter. The jerks on Lombard Street trying to charge a toll to drive down their stupid winding street. If you need another, consider the traffic.
Oh god, the traffic.
San Francisco Bay Area commuters spend an average of 78 hours creeping through gridlocked traffic each year, according to the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. So when the San Francisco fire department shut down a swath of downtown because a malfunctioning crane threatened to drop a one-ton slab of concrete from a height of 30 stories, you'd expect a full-on traffic cataclysm. Especially since this mess occurred just a few blocks from the entrance to the Bay Bridge.
Turns out, nope. As you can see from the above timelapse comparing yesterday to the average Wednesday, traffic wasn't much worse than usual. On one side, lots of red. On the other, lots of red.
Credit a lucky break with the timing. The mishap occurred at about 3 pm, giving commuters time to get out of town before rush hour. (The black cross marks the construction site, the purple box the shut down area.)
"Had this happened at four or five o’clock, it’s likely traffic would have been much worse," says Bob Pishue at Inrix, which provided the traffic data. Meaning people would have spent 80 hours creeping through traffic this year.
