Still, delays in the Oklahoma City area are nothing compared to those in the most congested U.S. cities.
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While Pittsburgh’s numbers were bad, they were better than the national averages of 42 hours and $960 wasted in traffic, according to the report, which was issued today.
If you’re the average commuter in the Lehigh Valley, you lost more than an entire day sitting in traffic previous year, according to a new study.
While the slight improvement may seem worthy of celebration, to the people who assembled the report the shift is really just a reflection that traffic congestion in South Florida’s metropolitan areas remains about the same as it was in the 2011-2012 time period.
The findings are based on federal data about how many cars are on the roads and on traffic speed data collected by INRIX on 1.3 million miles of urban streets and highways.
Co-author Bill Eisele said Washington, D.C., had the worst traffic; followed by Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. “Big towns and small cities have congestion problems – every economy is different and smaller regions often count on good mobility as a quality-of-life aspect that allows them to compete with larger, more economically diverse regions”.
Nationally, more jobs and cheaper gasoline mean that U.S. roads are more clogged than ever before.
Rounding out the 10 worst commuting cities are San Jose, Calif.; Boston; Seattle; Chicago; Houston; and Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.
“Boosting transit and making roads function more efficiently is the best way to reduce congestion”, Murray wrote.
Another measure of how congestion makes driving worse is the so-called freeway planning time index.
Texas A&M Transportation Institute and the traffic monitoring firm INRIX say the Bridgeport-Stamford area is the second-most congested area of its size in the nation, and motorists there spent an average of 49 hours in traffic tieups each year. By 2020, the average delays are expected to grow to 47 hours a year with a total of 8.3 billion hours.
The report also found that while severe and extreme congestion levels affected only 1 in 9 trips in 1982, it was encountered in 1 in 4 trips in 2014.
What the solution? As former state Transportation Commissioner Jim Simpson said, we can’t pave our way out of congestion. The Division of Transportation stated People drove greater than three trillion miles within the final 12 months, surpassing the earlier report set in 2007.
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The latest data in an annual “urban mobility scorecard”, compiled by national researchers, shows the Philadelphia metro area ranks 22nd in yearly delay per commuter, 25th in slow-moving rush-hour traffic, 26th in congestion cost per commuter, and 18th in excess fuel used because of congestion.
