He said growing commute times are the result of more cars on the roads, a measure of an economy that has recovered from the Great Recession.
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“Other economies have been growing faster than the Philadelphia area, thus congestion”, he said.
Here’s a price tag to go along with those frightful number: traffic congestion now costs the U.S. some $160 billion annually, or $960 per commuter. In the nation’s capital, commuters spent an average of 82 hours of their year – almost 1 percent of their time – bumper-to-bumper.
The 2015 Urban Mobility Scorecard, compiled by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and Inrix, a traffic monitoring company, said the average Pittsburgh commuter wasted 39 hours while stuck in traffic past year and burned 21 additional gallons of gasoline.
Congestion elevated in 61 of the nation’s 101 largest cities from 2012 to 2013, the info confirmed. New Haven came in 11, with an average of 40 hours a year in traffic jams.
“Nearly all” of the 9 million jobs lost during the crash have been regained, they say, and the report shows the areas that experienced higher-than-average employment growth also saw the most growth in traffic congestion.
The gridlock dilemma is already twice as bad as it was nationwide in 1982 and quadruple what it was for cities with populations of less than half a million people.
“Some of this is individuals taking some responsibility for knowing their options and figuring out how to plan around stuff”, Lomax said, “and their employers offering options that still work for the business but make that commuting experience less onerous for their employees”. “This problem calls for a classic all-hands-on-deck approach”, a co-author says.
U.S. roads are more clogged than ever now that the recession is behind us. That’s a new record, surpassing the 2007 peak just before the global financial crisis.
He says that means more trucks on the road and more trips overall.
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“Connectedness, big data and automation will have an huge impact over the next decade on how we travel and how governments efficiently manage the flow of people and commerce across our transportation networks”, says Jim Bak, one of the report’s authors and a director at INRIX. By 2020, the average delays are expected to grow to 47 hours a year with a total of 8.3 billion hours. Oregon’s total vehicle miles traveled increased 6.3 percent during the first five months of 2015 compared with the same period a year ago.
