Matt Seepersad, a manager for a moving company, wakes up at 3:30 a.m. to get to work at 5 a.m.

He lives in Poinciana and works at an office on Narcoossee Road in Lake Nona, less than 30 miles away, but he said it takes him an hour every day to get to work — and two hours to get home.

“I speak to hundreds of people who are moving and they all say the same thing: ‘I’ve got to get out of this traffic,’” Seepersad said.

He’s not alone in enduring ever-lengthening commutes. Traffic in Orlando hit a new high in 2024, with drivers across the City Beautiful wasting an average of 68 hours sitting in traffic last year, up 6% from 2023.

It’s part of a trend seen across the nation, where the national average has hit an all-time high of 63 hours, equivalent to nearly eight full workdays lost to traffic, according to the latest urban mobility report by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.

Orlando ranks 24th for traffic delays out of the top 101 urban areas with a population over 1 million, but Miami and St. Petersburg are worse. The average driver in Miami lost over 90 hours sitting in traffic, the report says.

Central Florida’s growth has worsened its traffic woes, said Kartikeya Jha assistant research scientist at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.

The Orlando metro area has ballooned in size, adding over 76,000 new residents in just one year in 2024 and outpacing the state’s growth, U.S. Census data analyzed by the Orlando Economic Partnership shows. The region’s population now stands at over 2.9 million.

“Orlando as a thriving area has worsened congestion, and that happens as usual for any growing area,” Jha said. “It contributes to increased congestion over time, so that’s natural.”

Seepersad said traffic has “definitely” gotten worse over the last 13 years he has lived in Orlando. Working six days a week, and enduring those long commutes, makes spending time with his five-year-old daughter difficult, he said.

“You leave work at 5 and you get home at 7, how much time do you have with your family before you have to go back the next day?,” Seepersad said. “You get home and you’re exhausted and the traffic will be more exhausting than your day at work a lot of times.”

The transportation institute collects traffic data from federal databases and takes into account all city and county roads as well as highways and expressways, Jha said. Tracking precise changes in travel patterns gives transportation planning officials and local governments the opportunity to look at lower-cost improvements instead of expanding entire highways or expressways.

“For example, you can do targeted capacity expansion,” Jha said. “If you see certain movements need additional lanes or a wider lane you can just do that or maybe you don’t need to add two lanes in each direction only one.”

There is some silver lining in the data. Traffic patterns have changed, which could be beneficial.

Post-pandemic congestion is more spread out, and less concentrated into the typical evening and morning rush hours, Jha said. The increase in people working from home and more flexible hours has led to a shift in traffic toward the middle of the day. And delays now peak on Thursdays instead of Fridays.

“It’s good in a way, because our transportation systems are able to absorb that demand during more hours of the day,” Jha said. “We are seeing that our transportation system is now able to handle a little bit more than what they used to be able to.”

For Seepersad, though, the traffic news is all bad. With more time spent on the roads, his moving company had to reduce the number of people it can move from two or three in a day to just one or one-and-a-half, he said. It’s also increased company costs in fuel and truck maintenance by 30%, as well as costs for customers who pay for time and labor.

“It makes my job a little harder because a lot of my guys are moving around in their trucks,” Seepersad said. “The delays that it causes throughout the day have changed the scope of what we’re able to do in a day.”