As traffic congestion continues to worsen, the time required for a given trip becomes more unpredictable, and researchers now have a way to measure that degree of unreliability, introduced for the first time as part of the annual Urban Mobility Report, published by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. The most recent report shows that Baton Rouge drivers spent an extra 42 hours on the road at a cost of over $1,000 per driver in lost time and fuel expenses in 2011. That number hasn’t changed since 2010 and has actually decreased by an hour compared to 2008 and 2009 statistics which reflected 43 hours of lost time in traffic for Baton Rouge commuters. Baton Rouge was ranked as the 21st worst city in the nation out of the 101 cities studied for traffic. Traffic congestion in U.S. cities has remained relatively stable in recent years and continues to underscore the link between traffic and the economy, according to the UMR. As the nation’s job picture has slowly improved, some congestion measures in 2011 were generally comparable to the year before. Nationally, fuel wasted in congested traffic reached a total of 2.9 billion gallons – enough to fill the New Orleans Superdome four times. That’s the same as 2010, but short of the 3.2 billion gallons wasted in 2005. The Travel Time Index (the difference in time required for a rush hour commute compared to the same trip in non-congested conditions) remained steady at 1.18, still short of the 1.23 level in 2005. The total financial cost of congestion in 2011 nationally was $121 billion, up one billion dollars from the year before and translating to $818 per U.S. commuter. Of that total, about $27 billion worth was wasted time and diesel fuel from trucks moving goods on the system. See the full report for Baton Rouge here.
↧