The future. (Photo by philliefan99)

Barely a month goes by without the D.C. area being reminded that it suffers the worst traffic in the United States, but just how bad is it? Well, according to fresh data from the U.S. Census Bureau, a growing number of people who work in and around Washington face daily commutes of 90 minutes or longer.

That’s an hour and a half, each way.

The Census found that in 2011, four percent of D.C. area residents were “mega-commuters,” meaning that they lived more than 50 miles and longer than 90 minutes away from their workplaces. And in many cases, the commutes can be far more onerous. The Washington Post talked to Andrea Barber, a legal secretary for a nonprofit organization who lives in Hagerstown and works in Dupont Circle. It routinely takes her two hours to get to and from work.

Meanwhile, even for those who do not face hours-long journeys to their office, D.C. offers the second-worst commute in the nation, but only by a difference of seconds. The average regional commute is 34.5 minutes; only the New York area was worse, at 34.9 minutes. Part of the reason for the long commutes in the D.C. area is that because unlike other metropolitan areas, there are more jobs in the center than the suburbs, the Post reports:

“In many other metro areas, jobs tend to move out to the suburbs, but we’ve got a lot of white marble buildings downtown, and they aren’t leaving,” said Alan Pisarski, who lives in Northern Virginia and wrote “Commuting in America,” a report on commuting patterns and trends. “So you have a lot of people who are employed downtown and they’re forced to the farthest edges of the region in order to find affordable housing. That’s why every morning, you see those cars moving up I-95 in the HOV lanes, and down from Maryland.”

And Barber, the Hagerstown resident, has it easy compared to others. The Census found people who commute to the D.C. area from as far away as New Jersey and Pennsylvania.