Nashville commuters spent almost 39 million hours in morning and afternoon rush hour traffic delays past year, according to the report. A summary of our work is in the City Subjects card deck “Questioning Congestion Costs”.
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Houston (61 hours) and Riverside-San Bernardino, California (59 hours) were in the bottom half of the top 10.
The annual report takes a look at traffic in more than 400 cities and towns across the nation. But nearly all regions now have worse congestion than before the 2008 crash.
An uptick in the U.S. economy has an unpleasant side effect: more people on the road. That was the latest in a long series of short-term extensions Congress has approved because lawmakers can’t agree on a long-term plan to shore up the highway trust fund. That account, which is financed largely through fuel taxes, has struggled in recent years to keep up with federal obligations to the states. But that’s just a down payment on decades of delayed maintenance, repairs and replacements.
“Our growing traffic problem is too massive for any one entity to handle – state and local agencies can’t do it alone”, says Tim Lomax, a report co-author and a regents fellow at the transportation institute. “Maybe that helps you to understand that transit is a better option, rather than have the auto shove you toward the Beltway on a big accident day”.
Transportation analyst Alan Pisarski stated the nation missed a “large alternative” to make amends for constructing further transportation capability in the course of the recession, when development prices plummeted.
The nationwide common time that commuters wasted caught in visitors final yr was 42 hours, about the identical as in 2007 and greater than twice the delay in 1982, when the transportation institute first started assessing city mobility.
According to the report, each commuter in Austin wastes 52 hours per year in traffic.
Boston (64 hours) came in sixth nationwide.
For motorists stuck in traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway or I-95, it may be of little comfort, but highway congestion in the Philadelphia region isn’t as bad as in many other urban areas. That’s an hour increase from the previous year and has increased since 2010.
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If the financial system stays robust, congestion will proceed to worsen, the report tasks. The numbers also claim that this time resulted in 3.1 billion gallons of wasted fuel, and cost the economy $160 billion.
