Want A Short Work Commute In Texas? Here’s Where To Live.

One of the most common phrases I hear in Amarillo has to be, "It takes ten minutes tops to get anywhere in the city". It's something we were told when we first moved here, then we adopted the saying ourselves because hey, it seemed like it was true.

Now I'm starting to question if we're all just full of hot air when we say that.

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Now to be fair, it DOES feel like that's all it takes to get somewhere in the city, no matter where you seem to live. Some new info has come to light though that has made me reconsider if this is true.

I started to time myself when running an errand from the house, and I will say that there are a lot of places I can get to in 10 minutes or less, however, this doesn't seem to always hold weight. If I have to drive from my house to somewhere in Soncy, it's definitely longer than 10 minutes.

And now I've found a recent study published by Stacker that shows the average commute to work in all the Texas counties. I figured I would find Potter and Randall County on this list without a doubt.

I was wrong. So wrong that we couldn't even find Potter or Randall County in the top 50 counties to commute to work in Texas.

So what was this study based around? It came from the United States Census Bureau, which factored in almost everything you can think of. Now for me, my commute to work is about 10 minutes from door to door. There's that saying again. The difference is that I head in to work before 7 am, so I'm kind of beating the rush you could say.

#50 on this list was Haskell County. The mean travel time to get to work there is 18.2 minutes. They have 30.5% of their population that works outside their county of residence and 7.3% with a commute that is 60 minutes or longer.

Ok, so now that we have that kind of info, we can break down the Amarillo area and it may explain things a bit better. It's not JUST Amarillo we're looking at here. We have to take into account places like Canyon, Dumas, Pampa, Hereford, etc.

What this tells us is the commute to work in Potter and Randall County is longer than 18 minutes, and probably closer to 20-25 minutes when you factor in all the surrounding cities people travel into these counties from for work.

So what county was #1 on the list? That belongs to Kinney County, found near the city of Uvalde. They have a mean travel time to work of just 7.1 minutes. That is literally 6 minutes short than #2 on this list. Can you imagine that being your commute every day? What I wouldn't give.