Monday, February 20, 2017 8:40 am
Traffic jams cost U.S.
drivers an average of 1,200 dollars a year in wasted fuel
and time, and much more in Los Angeles, the city
with the world’s biggest rush hour traffic delays,
according to a study by INRIX Inc released on
Monday.
INRIX, based in Kirkland, Washington, aggregates
and analyses traffic data collected from vehicles
and highway infrastructure.
The company said the
latest edition of its Global Traffic Scorecard report
was based on 500 terabytes of data from 300
million sources.
While Thailand was the world’s most congested
country in 2016, according to the study, the United
States had the worst traffic among rich, developed
economies.
Five of the world’s 10 most
congested cities are in the United States, INRIX
found.
U.S. traffic congestion is not a new problem, but
it could get renewed attention if President Donald
Trump pushes for a large-scale infrastructure
investment programme as he has promised.
Chronic traffic jams are a concern for global
automakers, and some major cities have begun to
limit private motor vehicle access to central city
areas.
The INRIX study sliced data in different ways. Los
Angeles drivers spent an average of 104 peak
drive-time hours fighting slow traffic during 2016.
That put Los Angeles at the top of the list of cities
where drivers spent the most hours stuck in slow
rush hour traffic.
However, on a different measure, time stuck in
congestion as a share of all driving, Moscow
drivers had it worse.
They spent 25.2 per cent of
their total driving hours on congested roads, while
Los Angeles motorists spent 12.7 per cent of their
total driving time in slow traffic, the study found.
In Bogota, Colombia, motorists spend 31.8
per cent of their total driving time in traffic jams.
The worst stretch of road in the United States is
New York City’s Cross Bronx Expressway, where
drivers on the 4.7 mile (7.5 km) road spent an
average of 86 hours a year staring at the bumper
of the car ahead.
After Los Angeles, INRIX listed New York, San
Francisco, Atlanta and Miami as the most traffic-
choked U.S. cities.
(Reuters/NAN)
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