American Idle 2005: On average, US drivers spent 38 hours idling in traffic, totaling 4.2 billion hours, wasting 11 billion litres of fuel or 98 litres each, at an economic cost of $78.2 billion or $710 per commuter.
Posted by envirostats on Wednesday, September 19, 2007
11 billion litres = 2.9 billion US gallons
98 litres = 26 US gallons
The study encompassed 437 urban areas and 85 intense focused urban areas.
Visually, time and gas wasted idling was 105 million weeks of vacation and 58 fully-loaded supertankers.
The 4.2 billion hours total in 2005 was up from 4 billion hours in 2004.
Los Angeles had the worst average of 72 hours per year, followed by Atlanta (60 but down from 70 in 1996), San Francisco, Washington and Dallas. Contrast that against the best average of about 8 hours per year in Spokane, WA and Brownsville, TX.
There were graphs and tables for when the most congested travel times were for 85 high focus urban areas.
The report also focuses on the problems presented by “irregular events”—crashes, stalled vehicles, work zones, weather problems and special events—that cause unreliable travel times and contribute significantly to the overall congestion problem. Worsening congestion, the study notes, is reflected in several ways:
- Trips take longer
- Congestion affects more of the day
- Congestion affects weekend travel and rural areas
- Congestion affects more personal trips and freight shipments
- Trip travel times increasingly are unreliable
Researchers spent two years revising the methodology using additional sources of traffic information, providing more—and higher quality—data on which to base the current study.
The report identifies multiple solutions to the congestion problem that, researchers say, must be used together to be effective. These include:
- Get as much service as possible from existing infrastructure
- Add road and transit system capacity in critical corridors
- Relieve chokepoints
- Change usage patterns
- Provide choices
- Diversify the development patterns
- Keep expectations realistic
“Congestion is a far more complex problem than is apparent at first glance,” study co-author Tim Lomax said. “The better the data we use to define the problem, the more successful we will be in addressing its root causes.”
This is a fantastic report with a stunning set of statistics, but because it was focused on congestion rather than environmental impact, car emissions seems to have been neglected and the cost of idling in American commuting could well be far greater than the $78.2 billion if costs to mitigate air pollution and associated health impacts were also figured into the true cost.
I have not yet had time to see if the Canadian Vehicles Survey: Annual for 2006, by Statistics Canada (0.3 MB) had any similar estimates, even if from a sample, but Canadian commuting habits are available there which may serve as interesting comparisons. More statistics from there will be posted later. [Envirostats author]
- Texas Traffic Institute, source site press release with lots of links to direct information, Sep 18 2007
Saturday, April 26, 2008 at 10:25 am
[...] though. A study at Texas A&M University found that in 2005 U.S. drivers spent an average of 38 hours idling in traffic, and in Los Angeles the average was almost double - 72 hours of gas and money wasting, emissions [...]