In Los Angeles the average commuter spends 82 hours each year sitting in traffic

November 17, 1999
Web posted at: 3:04 p.m. EST (2004 GMT)

In this story: Sprawl a villain When local economies boom, traffic stinks RELATED STORIES, SITES

WASHINGTON -- Drivers are motionless in Seattle, bedeviled in Boston and hung up in the heartland.

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A nationwide study that details the snarling of American roads finds congestion just about everywhere in urban centers -- even in places that were freewheeling only 15 years ago.

The study by the Texas Transportation Institute says the average driver spent 82 hours a year stuck in congestion in Los Angeles; 76 in the Washington, D.C. area; 69 in Seattle; 68 in Atlanta and 66 in Boston. The national average of time spent in congestion was up about 30 percent over five years, to 34 hours a year.

Why is there so much congestion? "The common knowledge is that congestion is caused by growth, and so we have to build more roads," says Gloria Ohland of the Surface Transportation Policy Project, which did a companion study. "But I think the report says...it's not caused by growth. It's caused by the fact that people are driving more! We have built enough roads to keep pace with growth!"

In the 68 counties it studied, Orlando's group says the problem is urban sprawl.

But some cities in California and scattered areas of the nation have figured out how to stop a bad situation from getting much worse, the Texas Transportation Institute said in its annual study released Tuesday. The study is based on commuting figures from the federal government and states.

The San Francisco-Oakland metropolitan area, Hartford, Connecticut, Honolulu and Brownsville, Texas, held the line on congestion over five years, while San Jose, California, actually saw a decline, the study found.

And notorious Los Angeles, easily the national leader in horrendous traffic, didn't get much worse.

Even so, the report points to an expanding spidery network of clogged traffic arteries across the urban landscape since 1982, when only one-third of peak urban travel was stop-and- go.

Today, two-thirds of that travel is through congestion, and smaller cities are not exempt. The worst growth in bumper-to- bumper driving was in Indianapolis, where the time an average motorist spent stuck in traffic grew by 225 percent, to 52 hours a year, between 1992 and 1997.

Report co-author Tim Lomax says the short lesson from the study is that when local economies boom, traffic stinks.

Cities where mobility held steady generally went through recessions, while most of the increasingly tangled cities posted economic gains.

"In a booming economy, the transportation system is always going to be a lagging factor," Lomax said from College Station, Texas, where he usually breezes to work in 15 minutes.

The Transportation Institute, part of Texas A&M University, examined traffic in 68 urban areas. Its report is considered one of the most sophisticated measures of mobility -- so much so that groups with differing viewpoints seized on the findings to make their case for more road building, less road building or other solutions.

The American Road and Transportation Builders Association faulted the scarcity of road construction, saying opponents have been tying up needed new lanes.

"Adding capacity has not been an aggressive strategy in most urban areas," said association president Peter Ruane, who spends two hours a day driving between his Maryland home and Washington office, without the benefit of carpool lanes.

The Surface Transportation Policy Project, which advocates alternatives to driving, argued more roads attract more vehicles and add to sprawl.

"If we want to curb that congestion, we need to curb that spread, so people can get around without driving everywhere," said group spokeswoman Barbara McCann, a Washington resident who needs no car to commute.

The study contends adding lanes does relieve congestion, at least for a time. It also credits Houston's 72-mile system of carpool lanes with making a noticeable difference.

But it says no single solution exists, and cities will have to decide what mix of road building, mass transit, carpooling, ramp metering and other strategies to use.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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