Is Twin Cities traffic getting worse? Depends when and where you go.

The trip between Minneapolis and St. Paul has been agonizingly slow for drivers on Interstate 94 in recent weeks. It has not been much better for motorists using I-494 to travel through Eden Prairie, Richfield and Bloomington.

The workhorse of the south metro, Crosstown Hwy. 62, has been constantly plugged up. And it’s been a slow roll on I-694 in the north metro.

Many drivers have posted their frustrations online and wonder if metro roads are returning to the way they were before the 2020 pandemic, when the Twin Cities often showed up on lists of America’s most traffic-riddled cities.

“Things have definitely gotten worse if you are trying to travel east-west,” said Eric Lind, researcher at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies.

In the grand scheme, however, Twin Cities traffic isn’t as bad as it seems. For each of the past three years in May, Lind gathered MnDOT data collected from freeway sensors that measure traffic volumes and speeds and supply that information to the agency’s 511 online traffic map.

He analyzed the data from 2023 through 2025 and found congestion has not increased all that much. Even MnDOT’s most recent congestion report showed Twin Cities freeways were congested 19.1% of the time during peak periods last year, down from 22.1% in 2023.

“There was not a huge signal that things are getting worse,” Lind said.

That may not make anybody sitting in traffic feel better. Bad traffic is often a result of where a vehicle travels and when. And this year, a trifecta of factors are conspiring to slow drivers down, creating the perception that roads are worse than ever.

Construction tops the list, with key east-west routes such as I-94 in the heart of Minneapolis down to two lanes in each direction. Road work on I-494 in the south metro has constricted traffic flow and pushed more vehicles onto the already overstressed Crosstown.

In contrast, north-south route Hwy. 100 in St. Louis Park has held up well, seeing about the same levels of congestion last year as it did in 2023, Lind said.

As state workers and others have been called back to the office at least part time, more vehicles are in the same places at the same time. People who were not traveling in the past are now sharing the road with other commuters, so more people are experiencing the same conditions, Lind said.

“It’s not that the traffic is worse; you have more people in it,” he said.

Simultaneously, COVID-era travel patterns still come into play. Met Council travel behavior surveys show midday and early afternoon trips have increased since the pandemic as drivers make more trips to appointments, shuttling kids to sporting activities and making school pick-ups.

“You have more people on the roads earlier,” Lind said. “The shift in traffic can make it feel worse because it gets slower earlier in the afternoon.”

Once traffic flow breaks down and congestion develops, it is hard for a road to recover, Lind said.

Despite backups in places that could persist for months until construction season winds down, it could always be worse.

Compared to other peer metro areas, “the big picture is that it’s still a pretty good place to reach destinations in the Twin Cities by car,” Lind said.

And if you disagree, there is this reminder from satellite navigation maker TomTom, which in 2010 put up a billboard that read, “You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.”