How Much Does Getting Stuck in Traffic Cost Us?

When you add up all the wasted time and gasoline, traffic hotspots cost drivers billions of dollars. Learn how researchers are using technology to measure the problem -- and hopefully make it better.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Pay their
brain Stuff Lauren vocal Bomb here. If you live in
or near a major city and drive a car, you
probably can't do much these days to avoid traffic, not
short of inventing your own vertical takeoff and landing technology anyways.
But what makes driving in some cities worse than others,
or one road more congested than another. Well, according to RICS,

(00:25):
a company that analyzes traffic and infrastructure data, it's traffic
hot spots. They define these as traffic jams that occur
at the same locations along a stretch of road. According
to Mark Burfield, the director of public relations at RICS,
key elements that define a traffic hot spot are that
they are reliable and predictable. If a commuter travels along
the same route at the same time every day and

(00:46):
it's always backed up at the same intersection or merge point,
that is a traffic hot spot. A recent study by Enrics,
released in September of seventeen, named and ranked the worst
traffic hot spots in the United States, one hundred and
eight thousand of them in the twenty five most congested
US cities l A, New York, Washington, d c Atlanta,
and Dallas were the top five containing the most ENRICS

(01:09):
conducted the study to learn more about the u S
transportation network. Is sort of a check up on the
well being of our roadways. The results will be used
to help determine the best and most efficient ways to
allocate money towards the country's transportation infrastructure. In other words,
by identifying the worst traffic hot spots and how they work,
public officials can make the upgrades that will have the
most benefit to drivers. For the purposes of the study,

(01:30):
ENRICS used its cloud based traffic analysis tool called Roadway
Analytics to analyze areas with frequent traffic jams and then
further narrowed those down to spots where speeds were typically
observed to drop below six of an uncongested reference speed
for at least two minutes at a time. In other words,
in a hot spot, traffical slow to less than half
its usual pace. The study also looked at the economic

(01:53):
costs in terms of wasted time, lost fuel, and carbon
emissions over the next decade. Using the data it gathered,
ENRICS created a global traffic scorecard, which ranks the cities
with the worst traffic and identifies the time and money
wasted in traffic congestion. The Global Traffic Scorecard rate cities
on a metric called the impact factor, which is calculated
by duration times distance times the number of traffic jams.

(02:16):
Here are some of the insights from the study. Though
New York has more traffic hot spots than any other
city in the study, drivers in Los Angeles pay more
due to hot spots. In l A, there were more
than one hundred and twenty eight thousand traffic jams just
during March and April. Of The worst single hot spot
in the country is near Fredericksburg, Virginia, on south at

(02:36):
Exit one three A, and the researchers estimate that it
will cost drivers there two point three billion dollars through
a jam in this hot spot lasts thirty three minutes
on average and stretches about six point five miles that's
about ten point four kilometers. The report concluded that across
all twenty five cities studied, traffic hot spots will cost

(02:56):
drivers four hundred and eighty billion dollars during the next
ten years. That's in lost time, wasted fuel, and carbon emitted.
When extrapolated across the country as a whole, the cost
of these hot spots is expected to reach two point
to trillion dollars that's trillion with a t through. Connected
cars and mobile devices are the key to this study

(03:17):
since they can be tracked by GPS. For example, if
you're using a smartphone to monitor traffic, researchers can tell
when and where you speed up, slow down, and come
to a stop. Though the data is anonymous, Intereacs isn't
the only company that takes advantage of our connectivity. For example,
if you use Google Maps to calculate a route and
get travel time estimates, those estimates are also courtesy of
real time GPS analytics. In addition to the tangible effects,

(03:41):
hot spots contribute to hard to measure problems, such as
a city's overall reputation for being a difficult or expensive
place to live, work, or visit. After all, no one
wants to go on vacation and wind up spending most
of their time in bumper to bumper traffic. That means
this data is extremely useful to cities that are trying
to improve their roads or their economics. For ex sample,
Chicago recently implemented strategies to ease congestion along I ninety,

(04:04):
which improved rush hour travel times by for westbound commuters.
A new lane was added on each side of the expressway.
Buses and emergency vehicles are now authorized to use the
shoulder lane, and real time traffic data, again gathered from
GPS enabled cars and mobile devices, is provided to commuters. California,
New Jersey, and Washington are among states that have recently

(04:24):
passed legislation to authorize funding for infrastructure upgrades. The goal,
presumably is to pave the way for smoother traffic when
or if autonomous cars become the norm, but there's no
reason that American drivers shouldn't benefit from this technology now.
This episode was written by Charis three Witt and produced

(04:46):
by Tristan McNeil. For more on this and lots of
other big data topics, visit our home planet, pastaff works
dot com.