The widely-reported Urban Mobility Study from the Texas Transportation Institute, released today, finds that nationwide travel delay due to congestion declined slightly from 2006 to 2007. In the 25 years that the study examines, this represents one of the few years that travel delay has declined. TTI points to spiking gasoline prices and the beginning of the economic downturn to explain the improvement in congestion.
Traffic on the Staten Island Expressway.
In the tri-state region, the trend mirrored the national picture, with travel delay falling in the New York City-Newark urban area, and holding steady in the Philadelphia, Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport-Stamford urban areas.
Even so, commuters in New York City still spent more than a typical work week (44 hours) stuck in traffic on an annual per capita basis. In Philadelphia, the figure was 38 hours. TTI calculates that Stamford-Bridgeport commuters spent 33 hours in traffic. In Hartford and New Haven, commuters spent 21 and 19 hours in traffic respectively. The cost of wasting all that time in traffic (in extra fuel and lost productivity) amounted to an astounding $11.2 billion annually for the entire tri-state region.
Coverage of the TTI report sometimes omits the role of mass transit in alleviating congestion, which is significant. TTI estimates that without the region’s subways, commuter rail and buses, tri-state commuters would have spent almost 343 million more hours stuck in traffic, at a cost of $7.4 billion annually.
The most congested urban area is the country in 2007 was Los Angeles, where the average commuter lost 70 hours a year to traffic.
Image: Staten Island Advance file photo.
[...] op-ed linked Gov. Rell’s planned hikes to the Texas Transportation Institute’s “Urban Mobility Report,” which found that commuters in the Stamford-Bridgeport area wasted an average of 33 hours in [...]