A new study by the respected Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University shows that traffic congestion is starting to creep back toward its pre-recession levels nationally – and it’s already forced travelers to dig deeper to pay for wasted gasoline.
The amount of idle time – time lost to traffic congestion – is growing too.
The 2010 Urban Mobility Report, released on Thursday, found that the effects of a national one-two punch of recession and high gas prices led to fewer people driving and hence fewer traffic backups. But clearly something is happening to put cars back on the road.
Travel delays cost us beyond longer commutes. Shawn Turner,researcher, said congestion also delays the delivery of consumer goods, effectively adding a delay tax to the products we buy.
That leads to an “air of unpredictability” at a time when major retailers and manufacturers rely on rolling inventories and just-in-time delivery, he said.
Among the report’s findings:
- Motorists wasted 3.9 billion gallons of fuel nationally in 2009 because of traffic congestion. The typical St. Louis commuter used 27 gallons of excess gasoline because of congestion.
- Congestion cost the average U.S. commuter $808 in 2009. In St. Louis, it cost the typical commuter $772 that year.
- Peak travel delays reached 34 hours for the typical commuter in 2009. For St. Louis commuters, traffic congestion cost 31 hours.
Overall, St. Louis traffic congestion put the city somewhere in the middle of the pack. Traffic delays were worst, predictably, in cities like Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles – cities where the annual delay per automobile was more than twice that of St. Louis.
The Texas Transportation Institute looked at traffic congestion in 439 urban areas across the United States.
– from stltoday.com