Inrix, a privately held provider of traffic data and traffic congestion solutions, recently published a national scorecard of traffic congestion, bottlenecks, and travel time indices of metropolitan areas across the United States. According to the Wall Street Journal, Inrix collects data on road congestion, in part, from a million vehicles equipped with GPS-enabled devices like cellphones and car navigation systems. The company stated in the accompanying press release that the data was:
revealing a 30 percent decline in traffic congestion in 2008 during the peak periods on major roads in urban America. Overall the report found that 99 of the top 100 most populated cities in the U.S. experienced decreases in traffic congestion levels in 2008 as compared to the prior year. The Scorecard contains the most accurate and current information in the country regarding overall congestion and bottlenecks on nearly 50,000 miles of America’s major roadways, and is compiled using tens of billions of data points from INRIX’s network of nearly one million GPS-enabled cars and trucks traveling across over 800,000 miles of roads.
The report cites turbulent fuel prices and a struggling economy as sources for a consistent decline in overall traffic volume. Detroit, where the jobless rate climbed past 21 percent in 2008, saw the second largest decrease in congestion nationwide. Additionally, Riverside, Calif., which ranked third-highest in the nation in foreclosure activity during 2008, saw the highest drop in congestion of the nation’s larger regions.
“On average, Americans spent 13 hours less stuck in traffic in 2008 versus 2007,” said Bryan Mistele, INRIX president and CEO. “While less traffic is generally good news, the causes of it aren’t necessarily something to celebrate. Traffic congestion is an excellent indicator of trends, telling us whether businesses are shipping products, whether people are going to work, and whether shoppers are going to the mall. The Scorecard provides an amazing lens through which we can see these and other major events unfolding across the country.”
Traffic congestion really is a lens through which you can view overall activity in the broader economy. Only Baton Rouge Louisiana had worst traffic congestion in 2008 than in 2007. Also, Inrix wrote that
National congestion levels were essentially the same when comparing the first and second halves of 2008, thus it seems that higher fuel prices in early 2008 and the slower economy later in the year netted the same drop in overall congestion.
So, what about Houston? Well, Houston's scorecard can be viewed here. What I find interesting are two things. First, Houston's overall congestion is measured at only 34 percent of that found in Los Angeles, the most congested metropolitan area in the United States. That is because LA has the fewest miles per capita of freeways of any major metropolitan area in America. Second, the data confirms what is probably intuitively obvious to many Houstonians. The overall worst traffic bottlenecks in the Houston area are to be found in the Galleria area. Six out of the top eleven worst bottlenecks are found along IH 610 Loop (southbound and northbound) and various entry or exits to the Galleria, including Westheimer, San Felipe, and Post Oak Boulevard. The exit at 610 Loop and Richmond Avenue comes in at number 22 on the bottleneck list.
The good news is that none of Houston's interchanges make the top 100 list of Inrix's worst segments or interchanges for traffic bottlenecks. The bad news, comparatively, is that every single one of Houston's 25 worst bottlenecks climbed up the overall rankings for bottleneck severity when comparing the 2008 data to the 2007 data, but that almost certainly reveals that the downturn in 2008 has affected Houston less than it has other areas of the country, an observation confirmed by the fact that Houston's travel time index declined only slightly in 2008 verses 2007.
Enough for now. There are other things I want to write about, so stay tuned.
Wizard
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at March 2, 2009 11:40 AM