It’s not just your family and social life that suffered.
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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. And drivers paid $1,739 in fuel costs and wasted time for the privilege of staring at someone else’s brake lights in 2014.
The study was produced by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and INRIX Inc., a traffic technology company in Kirkland, Wash.
San Francisco was third, with 78 hours of delay per commuter, followed by New York (74 hours) and San Jose (67).
New findings may confirm what many Bay Area commuters already know: The region’s roads are more clogged than ever.
This report is for you. The average for large cities with populations between 1 and 3 million (such as San Antonio, Portland and Denver) is 45 hours, placing Austin above the average and at No. 12 for the worst congestion among this demographic.
The Boston area ranks sixth for gridlock-plagued commutes in 2014. By this metric, Nashville ranks No. 29 on the nation’s most-congested cities (Texas A&M looked at more than 470). That might be some comfort when you’re crawling on the Helix or across the Pulaski Skyway, rather than the Beltway.
The cost of congestion varied widely through out the state. The time-lost ranking was 43rd among all the urban areas studied.
The good news for drivers is that the delays and costs have not gone up significantly over the last 10 years, according to the study. A total of 900 million “speed data points” helped determine that the total nationwide price tag of congestion in the U.S. was $160 billion in 2014, officials said.
The 64 hours of “delay per peak auto commuter” is slightly worse than the 2013 figure, when the region’s vehicle commuters lost 63 hours to congestion.
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.
Overall, Americans experienced 6.9 billion hours of traffic delays in 2014 compared with 6.6 billion in 2007 and 1.8 billion in 1982. And the National Safety Council said preliminary data for the first six months of this year show traffic deaths are up 14 percent, a turnaround after years of fewer fatalities. The roads, Lomax said, are a “a relic of where they were”.
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081-c-18-(Joan Lowy (LOH’- ee), AP correspondent)-“to rush hours”-AP correspondent Joan Lowy reports several factors are leading to the increased traffic congestion on U.S. roads”.
