Atlanta drivers waste 52 hours in traffic a year

The list is topped by Washington, D.C. with 82 hours of delay followed by Los Angeles and San Francisco. But compared with major cities, Wichita is not that bad.

Wichita drivers were delayed an average 35 total hours previous year during morning and afternoon rush hours.

Six of the country’s 10 most congested stretches of highway are in metro Los Angeles, with two each in Chicago and New York City. But, he said, larger metropolitan areas in the nation have more severe traffic snarls. The study suggests options to reduce traffic, including investing more money into roads and transit to meet the population growth but notes that is not a reality in some cities where space is maxed out.

Houston (61 hours) and Riverside-San Bernardino, California (59 hours) were in the bottom half of the top 10.

Among similar, medium-sized cities, only Honolulu had worst traffic, the study said. Austin, with an average 52 hours of delays, has had a strategy for decades of not building additional roads to discourage more people from moving in, he said.

Some smaller cities find themselves in the same traffic-snarled company as their sky-scrapered counterparts. That comes to more than 8.5 million gallons citywide. “This problem calls for a classic all-hands-on-deck approach”, a co-author says.

The release cited data from the U.S. Department of Transportation that said Americans have driven more than 3 trillion miles in the past year, a record that surpasses the peak in 2007 before the financial crisis. “There’s clearly this relationship that the higher congestion levels are a downside of this increase in economic activity”. “This report is a great example of how data and analytics are evolving to provide transportation agencies with the insight needed to not only make our existing transportation systems work smarter but more quickly pinpoint where investment can have a lasting impact”.

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.

Total the numbers and, the report says, Americans spend 6.9 billion hours battling traffic and burn 3.1 billion gallons of fuel while nudging inch by inch down the roadway. For one, their core measure of congestion costs – the “travel time index” – only looks at how fast people can travel, and completely ignores how far they have to go.