Happy traffic jams!

A return to congestion means a return to life as we like it

Traffic jams have returned to New York City.

Congratulations!

And it’s not just New York, but Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Houston and Seattle too.  The whole country is seeing a return of traffic, congestion, and bumper-to-bumper highways.

Isn’t it wonderful?

Below is the graph for absolute traffic congestion in New York City this year - you can see the large red dots since September that indicate it’s tough to get across town or to your meetings on time. 

Fantastic!

And below is the difference between 2021 and 2019 traffic, comparing the same day of the week.  It looks like traffic is a bit worse than it was in 2019 about 50% of the time. 

Glorious!

Because a return to traffic jams and congestion is a return to normalcy for all of us.

You can feel it on the streets in New York City.  As opposed to April 2020 when I walked through SoHo at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon and didn’t see a single person walking, or even a moving car, the traffic is nose-to-nose for blocks on end.  The restaurants are crowded, neighbors are complaining about the noise again, and reservations, which had been laughably unnecessary for months, are harder to get.

Perhaps because New York got hit first, we were scarred by the experience and are recovering last.  Other cities locked down less, and saw a smaller reduction in activity, and they are recovering as well.

And it’s not just within cities, but across the whole country - air travel is returning too.  Here are the TSA’s daily passenger numbers for last week compared to 2020 and 2019:

We’re 20% below 2019 traffic levels most days, sometimes only 10%.  And airports are handling double the number of passengers they handled this time last year.

So whereas normal might be closer to 2.5 mm travelers per day, we’re averaging 1.9 mm.  But that’s way up from the 750,000 per day at this time last year.

Interestingly, the actual facts about the toll of COVID are not much better than they were last year.  Compared to November 2020, we’re seeing about the same number of cases - a bit higher, actually, when we look closely:

And with regard to death toll, we’re also at the same level, if not a bit higher:

Factually, the disease is making the same number of Americans sick and killing the same number of Americans as last year, but we’ve learned to live with it better.

With COVID immunity making its way through the population, and vaccine coverage expanding to kids, I suppose we all feel that we’re just ready for tomorrow to be better than yesterday. 

So we’re back in the streets and back in the skies.

Because it’s been almost two years of this deadly nonsense, and we’re ready for our futures to start again.

It was March 5th of 2020, when I put my whole company through a “work from home drill”, that seemed a bit paranoid at the time.  It was such an unusual and alarmist step that the Washington Post sent a reporter to follow me around for the day.

This New York CEO put his company in a simulated coronavirus lockdown is the article he wrote, and you can get a good look at the kitchen table in my old New York apartment (one tasty block from America’s first pizzeria in Little Italy) before we had to move. That’s 21 months ago, and we’ve been waiting for the storm to break since then.

I’ve long used New York traffic to gauge the health of the economy.  Cheap town cars in midtown Manhattan in January 2008 signaled to me that the recession was coming.  I took some heat from readers for blowing things out of proportion, but like robins in spring, canaries in coal mines, and emails from HR, New York traffic is one of those small signals that the future is changing now.

If the trend holds, and we avoid a 4th wave (5th? 6th? I’ve lost count), it looks like 2022 will be a normal year in a normal society and we can all behave normally.  

Imagine that.

I’m rooting for you,

Marc Cenedella
@cenedella

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