If John Young Parkway — particularly south of downtown Kissimmee through Pleasant Hill Road — is part of your daily commute, you don’t need a reminder how slow and congested of a ride it is.
It’s epically bad. It’s among the worst commutes in the country — literally. And, now there’s data to back that up.
According to INRIX, a global provider of transportation analytics and connected car services, U.S. Highway 1792 (John Young) from U.S. Highway 192 to The Oaks Boulevard ranked as the seventh-most congested road in the county in 2021.
It’s peak delay is shown as 15 minutes — not the time it takes to drive that stretch, but the added delay it takes on top of a normal drive time.
A person who drives that stretch every day will lose 59 hours sitting in that traffic over the course of a year — that’s two-and-a-half days!
The Florida Department of Transportation has plans to widen John Young to three lanes in each direction from downtown Kissimmee to Pleasant Hill Road. At the southern end of the project had proposed an expanded intersection and a new flyover that would flow from Pleasant Hill during morning rush hour, and southbound onto Pleasant Hill in the afternoon. FDOT is now re-evaluating options for that intersection.
And, John Young isn’t even the region’s worst commute. Interstate 4 west south of Orlando between State Roads 528 and 429 is ranked the country’s No. 3 congested road by INRIX. But, when you add those two roads, the Orlando area isn’t anywhere near the top of the Most Congested Urban Areas list. That is dominated by the cities you’d expect — New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Miami (a stretch of Interstate 95 there is No. 8 on the bad commutes list), Los Angeles, San Francisco and Houston. They lead the nation in time lost, cost per driver (close to $1,000 annually) and cost per city (it’s in the billions).
