March 29, 2024
Commuters in Los Angeles waste 119 hours sitting in traffic every year
LOS ANGELES - Traffic delays are worse than ever across the U.S. Angelenos waste 119 hours a year stuck in gridlock, making it the U.S. city with the worst traffic in the latest Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s 2019 Urban Mobility Report. That’s just under five days, or an entire workweek, spent trying to get to and from the office. Worse, that time idling on the road is burning through an extra 35 gallons of fuel.

That’s almost double the national average, with urban commuters spending an extra 54 hours a year on congested roads, or 2.5 days (an entire weekend) trapped in their cars. What’s more, Americans are using an extra 21 gallons of fuel during these bumper-to-bumper slogs.

The report calculates these delays as costing around $1,010 per commuter, drawing on the median hourly wage from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But there’s also the incalculable cost of uncertain or longer delivery times; missed meetings; business relocations; and other congestion-related effects. On a national scale, the TTI report says that gridlock cost the country $166 billion in 2017, a more than tenfold increase over the previous 15 years.

And this isn’t just a big city problem. The report reveals that almost all regions now have worse congestion than before the 2008 economic recession, concluding that today’s record low unemployment rate means that more people are driving to and from their jobs on the same roads. “This has been the case in the past — the economy-congestion linkage is as dependable as gravity,” reads the report.

Of course, as ride-hailing services such as Uber, Lyft and Juno have become a key mode of transportation, with Uber rides surging past yellow cabs in NYC, for example, that have put more cars on the road, too. While these businesses have claimed to help ease congestion in cities, a recent San Francisco study found that locals spent 62% more time sitting in traffic in 2016 than they did in 2010, before ride-sharing went mainstream.

New York City is mulling how to implement the nation’s first congestion pricing system, charging cars a fee to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan, which would raise money for its overburdened mass transit system as well as discourage some drivers for adding to the congestion. And heavy-traffic cities on this list such as LA and San Francisco are doing their own congestion pricing studies to see if this could be a way to reduce gridlock.

Here are the five cities with the worst traffic:

Los Angeles: Commuters spend 119 extra hours (4.95 days) each year sitting in traffic, using 35 gallons of fuel.

San Francisco: Commuters spend 103 extra hours (4.3 days) sitting in traffic, using 45 gallons of fuel.

Washington, D.C.: Commuters spend 102 extra hours (4.3 days) sitting in traffic, using 38 gallons of fuel.

New York City: Commuters spend 92 extra hours (3.8 days) sitting in traffic, using 38 gallons of fuel.

Boston: Commuters spend 80 extra hours (3.3 days) sitting in traffic, using 31 gallons of fuel. (Source: MarketWatch)
Story Date: August 29, 2019
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