Living in the DC metro area since the 1970’s there are a few things I know.
1. Traffic in the Suburbs or around the Beltway is worse than being downtown. There are simply fewer roads/routes/choices to go from point a to b.
2. The Metro or Subway will almost always take longer than driving and it’s not cheap.
3. Young DC residents love Uber and this has actually put more cars in the downtown areas.
4. They have reduced what was three lanes on a number of city streets to two lanes to make room for a bike lane.
5. They have given pedestrians the “Right of Way” in the middle of a block and in some areas at every intersection at all times.
6. The traffic lights used to be timed on most of the major cross town and north/south streets that allowed you to cover ten or more blocks without stopping and that is no longer the case.
I currently live inside the Beltway and one of the biggest reasons I don’t want to move outside the Beltway is the traffic. Not just the traffic getting in and out of the city but the traffic suburb to suburb.
Suburb to suburb varies a lot, especially by time of day. I go from Annapolis to Tysons a few times per month. 47 miles.
At 8 am, it can easily be two hours. At 10:30 am, it is often about an hour, not infrequently under 55 minutes, and once in 48 minutes flat.
At 4 in the afternoon, the return trip can easily exceed 2 hours, and has occasionally stretched to nearly 3 hours. At 1:30 pm, the return trip can be an hour and ten minutes.