November 19, 2019 • 27 mins
There is enough gridlock out there to drive even the coolest car-loving commuter over a cliff, and traffic costs us much more than our minds. Listen to find out just how much modern-day logjams actually cost.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Car Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios.
How Stuff works. Well, folks, by now you know what
that music means. Welcome back to car Stuff. I am
one of your hosts today, Ben Bullet, and I'm Kurt
Darren and Kurt, I've got to tell you you and
I are both pretty fortunate when it comes to our
(00:23):
commutes in this our fair metropolis of Atlanta. How far
away would you say you are from the office minute wise?
A mile? One important distinction, and I recognize a local one.
I hear one. Man, I would say four miles, So
that would be between fifteen minutes and an hour, right depending,
(00:43):
Because as we know, if you are like anyone else
living in Atlanta, from the wealthiest person to the poorest person,
the oldest and the youngest of drivers, then you are
in an eternal battle with this city's sworn nemis. This
that is traffic. You know. I'm not gonna leave you
(01:03):
hanging out there, man, I will. I'll give you my
side of the story too. Right now, I live in
the same neighborhood where our offices, and traffic is so
bad in this neighborhood that it is honestly faster for
me to walk a lot of places than it is
to drive, especially during rush hour, which is I think
(01:24):
when you're four mile commute stretches to an hour. Right
and before then, when our office many years ago was
located in a different neighborhood closer to downtown Atlanta, I
had a commute that could easily stretch to an hour
and thirty minutes. And it was one of those things
(01:46):
where it didn't matter what side streets I took, It
didn't matter what kind of shortcuts I used, Like if
I didn't leave by four pm, I was just going
to stay there until at least six thirty. In previous
episodes of Car Stuff, Kurt, we've covered different aspects of traffic,
the best worst cities for drivers, world's largest traffic jams,
(02:08):
on and on and on. But today you and I
are going to look at something just a bit different.
It's a question for many of our fellow listeners to
ponder while you are stuck in traffic, because I was
thinking about this, man, what do you think the odds
are that someone listening to today's episode is listening while
they were in grid luck? The odds are pretty high,
(02:31):
do you think so? Well, try not to let the
road rage get you. Today, we are tackling this question
how much does traffic actually cost us here in the US,
both as individuals and as a country. To answer that question,
we have to look like everybody knows what traffic is, Kurt.
(02:52):
If you and I were stuck in traffic and someone
was explaining to us what traffic is, I might get
a little irritated it. So let's cut past that, and
let's just go to traffic jams. And what's one of
the biggest first questions we have about them? Why are
traffic jams so prevalent. The simple answer would be there's
a lot of cars on the road. However, there are
(03:14):
complexities to that. And here in Atlanta, we have eight
lanes of traffic on either side of the Inner States,
and traffic still somehow gets bottle necked. So the jam
is going to be happening way ahead of you, probably
where two lanes maybe exit onto another interstate, and folks
wait till the last minute to get over into those
two lanes, and someone has to hit their brakes, and
(03:35):
basically there's this domino effect that ripples back into traffic
and causes a jam for miles and miles back. I
guess that's the easiest everyday example. Yeah, and then you know,
as people drive and take the make these risky moves
to get over to the exit, accident may happen. So
then you have compounded the issue, you have a bottleneck,
and then you have an accident. You can easily see
(03:57):
how traffic can get out of hand when there's a
bunch of cars on the road, So it's not just
the amount of cars, it's myriad other factors. Yeah, yeah,
I like that you're pointing out the perfect word for this, compounding,
because just like compounding interests, those little taps on the
brake pedal add up. There's an increational, as you said,
(04:18):
domino effect that applies such that this little tap on
the brakes maybe a short a short pause, call it
two to three seconds. Right the car in front of
you stopped suddenly, so you have to tap your brakes
just two or three seconds, and then you all start
to roll along. I mean twenty miles you get up
(04:40):
to that, but everybody behind you is also tapping their brakes,
and they have to tap them for a longer amount
of time, until you could be as far as a
mile back and everybody has stopped This is a thing
that we can't really blame on one person. It's a
group behavior. And things get more complicated, and we ask
(05:01):
why there are so many cars and why are the
roads overloaded despite the fact that we build so many
extra lanes. Were continually Uh, We're continually trying to make
bigger and better roads and trying to maintain them. Our pal,
Jonathan Strickland is a podcaster, longtime colleague of ours, friend
(05:24):
of the show. He's been on Car Stuff a number
of times. He hosts a show called tech Stuff and
a couple of other podcasts here at I Heart Radio.
He also, before we even started podcasting, he would write
articles for our parent website, How Stuff Works, and he
wrote an article called how Traffic Works, which is a
(05:45):
pretty good read. Don't let him know that I said this.
Jonathan is a pretty sharp guy, and the way that
he breaks it down, there are two broad concepts of
play when we talk about traffic jams. The first is
network overload. The second is traffic disturbances. Network overload. It's
(06:05):
the fancy phrase for the idea that we already proposed,
and that is simply demand and supply right demand for
room on the road supply of room on the road,
there are these bottlenecks where traffic just inevitably seems to
exceed the road's capability to handle cars. That happens a
(06:25):
lot here in Atlanta. We've got a bunch of two
to four lane surface streets where a lot of people
want to make left turns, but there are no left
hand turned signals. And you probably in your own commute
have some bottlenecks that you've run into. Oh for sure.
The road that I take home is a four lane road.
(06:47):
There aren't left turn lane, so it's just divided, you know,
it's like a little divided highway. And it's a fairly
major back road into downtown Atlanta to and from, And
so as far as network overload goes that, there's just
a bunch of people trying to get to the same place.
And like you said, problems will arise with the whole
left turn thing, and people need to get to their
(07:07):
neighborhood and they need to turn left to do it,
and there may or may not be a left turn
ere there. So you have cars stacking up behind this
person turning left, and then inevitably they're gonna want to
get over into the right lane to ease around the
person turning left. It's that ripple effect. It just goes
back and back, and then then you put other stoplights
into the equation. That's a mess. Yeah, and think about
(07:28):
this hypothetical moment. Let's put ourselves in this situation. So
you're trying to get around someone who is making a
left hand turn. You see a space that opens up
right in the right lane, and you can accelerate and
escape this congestion. The person behind you can accelerate a
few minutes later, the person behind them can accelerate a
(07:48):
few moments after that. Right these other people in the
right lane that you you got in front of. This
doesn't mean the congestion immediately clears up, although it feels
like it does, because we're generally looking forward in our cars.
Behind us, this problem is just traveling in the other directions,
traveling behind us this congestion. And this is something called
(08:12):
the traffic wave effect. Imagine the domino effect on wheels,
but also the escalating agglomerative nature of the snowball effect,
where the problem worsens the further and further it goes.
So that's the first thing, network overload. Second thing, traffic
disturbances are exactly what they sound like, right, that is
(08:34):
a broad term. Immediately my mind goes to accidents, fender benders,
things of that nature, sometimes caused by the network overload itself. Yeah,
that's that's the thing that I think most of us
think of right now. And going back to you listener
there in traffic, I'm sure that if you live in
(08:54):
a city like ours, in your commute, you will see
at least one or two acts, dents hopefully everyone's okay,
or breakdowns, you know, a flat tire, overheated engine, something
like that. You will also see road construction and repair
that counts as a traffic disturbance. And you'll see harsh
(09:14):
weather conditions, which you know, our city gets a hard
time for because it just takes a little bit of
snow and the city shuts down. When was that two
thousand fourteen, they called it the snow apocalypse. Yeah, we can't.
The thing about traffic disturbances that differentiates them from network
overload is that we can, with enough study and analysis,
(09:40):
understand and predict network overload these inevitable bottlenecks, But we
cannot predict traffic disturbances. Although we cannot predict traffic disturbances,
we can say that they always spell problems for commuters.
No one is ever driving down a six lane highway
(10:01):
to see two of the lanes in their direction closed
off and going, oh, great, construction, awesome. You know, I'm
harping on Atlanta because that's where we have our daily
driving experience. But no one in this city sees those
famous metal plates on the road and says, oh great,
what a good job. I'm starting to get the feeling
(10:21):
that they're more of a permanent fix than a temporary fix.
But this is a giant metal plate that's placed over
a hole for an indefinite amount of time that the
county city d O T makes in the road, and
you don't really want to hit it going full speed,
so it's a slow down and thus the domino effect
behind you will take place. But these appear all over
(10:42):
the place, and often unannounced. I mean, you hit it
one time and you know it's there, but the first
time to me is always a surprise. There's actually one
right at the entrance to my neighborhood, so flied over
that on my way home. Um one other sidebar. Don't
mean to throw us too far off, but I finally
saw this phenomenon a couple of weekends ago, and it
(11:06):
was a rainy Sunday. I was driving down five, Interstate
five that goes around Atlanta, and um, I'm driving and
I see a pair of headlights coming in my direction. Yes,
so I finally saw the phenomenon of the car driving
down the wrong side of the interstate, which happens more
than you think two eighty five. I don't even know
(11:28):
how this car got Holy smokes, that's fast and furious
level dangerous. Yeah. Yeah, So the rest of the day,
I'm checking the news to see what happened with this
going down the wrong side of five. They never heard
anything of it. Again, were they in this slow? I mean,
what do you think this? Get this? This person was
(11:51):
in the left shoulder. There's maybe a eight or nine
foot retaining wall concrete the in between that in the
left lane, and they were going fairly quickly. I guess
they realized they were going the wrong way. That's why
they weren't on the road. I don't even know how
you get off from the left lane going the wrong way.
(12:12):
I just don't know how. I don't know how you
get on and then from there, I know how you
would get off. Yeah, because you get off, you have
to cut across the entirety of traffic in that direction,
which is a six lanes maybe this is right there
at spaghetti junction area. So that first off, I'm glad
(12:32):
you're okay. Uh. Secondly, everybody listening, please please please pay
attention to the wrong way signs. I know, traffic signs
can seem overall kind of negative. It's you know, no
turn here, no you turn wrong way, that kind of stuff. Really,
if you think about it, the only positive traffic sign
(12:53):
is the one that says keep going. Just the steer
us back on horse here. Um. So, traffic signs, that's
one thing that could um alleviate some of this network
overload that we were talking about. D O T and
work crews do their best to alert people to oncoming construction.
(13:15):
So you know, two miles ahead to two left lanes closed,
right lanes close ahead. Yeah, days ahead. Even even with accidents,
you have the signs accidents center lane three miles before
this exit. Why do folks wait till the last minute
to get over I'm gonna give the benefit of the
downton to the driver and say they were focused so
(13:37):
much on what they were doing that they didn't see
the sign. You know, they're looking at the road, eyes forward,
just paying attention because there's a lot going on. However,
if you move over early, it releases some of this
stop and go attention that we feel that gets escalated
the further back you go down the road. I completely
agree with your with what you're saying, but I think
for some people they feel that if they get over
(13:58):
to the right because the left lane is closed or
something two miles ahead, they feel like they're getting in
a longer line and it's gonna be slower and they
should just push the issue, drive as close to the
closure as possible, zip in at the last second. It's
also true, technically traffic is better for everyone if every
driver practices the zipper merge. But the zipper merge doesn't
(14:22):
happen in Atlanta. Atlanta is a very difficult city to
drive in because, for some reason, people who drive here,
and honestly myself included, I'm not going to throw stones
in this glasshouse. For some reason, all of us have
this sort of mad Max mentality when it comes to
the road and I know the road that you take home, dude,
(14:45):
I have been on that road. I used to have
that commute. People are monsters on that one windy and
they're very close lanes. They're not as wide as a
lot of other streets here in Atlanta. What does this
all mean? How does this work out? We a stat
for you. According to the two thousand and seven Urban
Mobility Report from the Texas Transportation Institute, traffic incidents counted
(15:09):
for between fifty two and fifty eight percent of the
delays we all experience in traffic. What that means is,
while there may be these unavoidable bottlenecks, you know what
I mean, like two interstate exits that are very close
to one another, exited entrance ramps, and you know something
where everybody has to try to go left while everybody's
(15:29):
trying to go right. While those bottlenecks do exist, more
than half of the reasons that we have traffic jams
are going to be those traffic incidents, road construction accidents, breakdowns,
things like that. However, there's another factor at play here,
and this comes to us from a private industry traffic
(15:50):
analysts called en rics I n R i X. This
was referenced in another House of Works article by our
contributing writer Sharre three Wit, who is a top notch
expert on all things automotive. So in Rex has their
own term for a network overload. It's a traffic hot spot.
(16:11):
According to in Rex, these traffic hot spots are responsible
for huge amounts of traffic congestion and huge amounts of
lost cash. We know a little bit about how they
started to break down the concept of traffic and how
they ultimately arrived at a financial answer, So we're gonna
(16:36):
walk through how they figured out what a traffic hot
spot was, how they analyzed it, and then ultimately how
much it costs. In two thousand and seventeen, Rics launched
a US transportation study. They called it the Health of
the Road. So they had to define what a hot
spot was. Um Interrics used a cloud based traffic analysis
tool called Roadway Analytics. They analyzed the areas with frequent
(16:59):
track jams, and they narrowed those down to spots where
the speeds were typically observed to drop below six pc
of normal of the non congested speed for at least
two minutes. If, for instance, they're looking at a road
where the speed limit is fifty five, if it drops
below of that from more than two minutes. It's a
(17:20):
traffic hot spot, right, yeah, yeah, in a hot spot,
traffic will slow less than half its usual pace. And
the study also looked at the economic costs in terms
of wasted time, lost fuel, and carbon emissions over the
next decade. So that kind of describes what they consider
to be cost. I guess because we have cost on
our you know, well being as well being. Sure, yeah,
(17:43):
it's a yeah, it's a it's an umbrella term. Well,
here's where the rubber hits the road, folks and the
nation's wallet. If you live near a city and you
also drive a car, you can't do very much to
avoid traffic. It's just there with you. It's gonna follow
you like a shadow. A two thousand seven studies showed
that in twenty eight urban areas across the US, drivers
(18:07):
spend get this, an entire work week's worth of time
sitting in traffic each year. So that means for almost
thirty cities in the US, you're losing an entire week,
five days of your life sitting in your car. So,
you know, make sure you have a comfortable one, make
(18:28):
sure you have a reliable one, make sure you can
listen to podcast while you're driving. The worst example we
found was Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, drivers lose almost
two weeks a year to traffic, and this does have
(18:49):
serious consequences. I'm glad you mentioned people's personal well being here, Kurt.
It's tough to put a price on that, but we
can estimate the cost of traffic through a couple of
different lenses. In two thousand five, the estimated cost of
traffic to the nation was more than seventy eight billion
in fuel and wasted time alone. So that's like, we
(19:13):
take the average income of someone you know for a
work week, and then we say, well, this is the
money that could have been made if they weren't stuck
in their vehicle. And then we also say this is
the amount of you know, like, this is the price
for gallon of fuel, how many cars were delayed? This
how much the fuel cost. Add those numbers together and
(19:34):
get seventy eight billion. It's missing important things. Doesn't factor
in stuff like damage to the environment possibly still kind
of hard to quantify, And it doesn't factor in health cost,
whether that is your physical health or your mental health,
you know what I mean. I'm sure there have been
a couple of people who went to a therapist or
(19:55):
something because of their road range. And what about wear
and tear on the roads are you could call? Yeah,
So Americans bought two point nine billion extra gallons of
gas because of traffic congestion than two thousand and five.
And the average annual cost to an individual driver was
seven ten dollars. And that's just due to the extra
(20:16):
time he spent on the road because of congestion. Yeah,
and let's go back to in RECs, let's look at
let's drill down into a specific example. In RECs found
that the single worst traffic hot spot in the country,
the single worst network overload instance or bottleneck, is near Fredericksburg, Virginia.
(20:37):
It's on Interstate South at exit one thirty three A.
And technically, I don't know it's true, but technically that
means that if you are stuck in traffic right now
and listening to this show, you have a higher than
average likelihood of being gridlocked there at South exite. Anybody
(21:00):
who's been through that, right to us, I mean right
to us when you're not driving, let us know if
this thing is as much of a bruiser as it sounds.
Because in Fredericksburg, Virginia. At that one spot. In the
entire country, drivers are losing an estimated two point three
(21:20):
billion dollars through twenty six. Two point three billion dollars
one stretch of Interstate Exit one thirty three A two
point three billions. That's crazy, and the numbers get higher
to right. In conclusion, the report said that across all
twenty five cities that they studied, traffic hot spots will
(21:42):
cost drivers four hundred and eighty billion dollars during the
next ten years and lost time, wasted fuel, and carbon admitted.
When that is broadened out across the country as a whole,
the cost of these hot spots is expected to reach
Kurt Kirk Kirk, can we get a drum roll real quick? Yes? Yes,
(22:04):
So the cost of these hot spots is expected to
reach two point two trillion dollars. That's trillion with a
t two point to trillion dollars. Is that even real money?
At that point? I can't, I can't. Are there trillionaires?
Is there someone with a trillion dollars? And that is
(22:26):
a real number, two point two trillion dollars. That's the
answer to today's episode. If you look at the cost
of lost time waste. If fuel carbon admitted from now
to it's going to hit two point to trillion dollars
in expenses. And of course that is an incomplete number.
(22:50):
We can't put a genuine hard number on the quality
of time loss to traffic, right because we can say
a work week. We can a person makes so and
so per hour or per year and do the math
that way, But we can't put a price on the
time that drivers could be spending with their family, their friends,
(23:12):
their loved ones. We can't put a price on, you know,
the cost of going to a psychiatrist because of your
traffic nightmares. And of course I don't know if we can,
but we have not yet put an annual cost on
the court cases for road rage. Hopefully we're kidding, but
you know there's stuff we can't price out right, and
(23:34):
that at risk of driving in congested areas is Yeah.
We didn't even mention the cost of insurance, which changes
based on where you live, and a lot of that
is due to you know, reports the crime or accidents. Right,
So there ends our story. Hopefully the congestion that you
(23:54):
were in while you were listening to today show has
eased up. A bit you're getting back up to you've
made it through your local traffic hot spot, and you've
only paid a bit of that two point two trillion
dollars in lost time. And this ends our episode, but
not our show. We want to know your traffic war stories.
(24:16):
What is the worst traffic jam you've ever been in? Briefly,
let's see. I think the worst one that I was
ever in probably was about not too bad. Actually it's
about four hours. It was about four hours I got
stuck in traffic on an interstate where there was a
(24:39):
major accident, and I was I was really irritated about
it until in the distance, like several miles ahead, I
saw a helicopter taking off, and I realized that whoever
was in that accident, it was getting a life flight
to a hospital. And that put things in perspective that
(25:00):
I mean, think, you know what, being four hours late
or being held up like that is still better than
being in a terrible accident, So everybody stays safe. I
don't know, Kurt, do you have any crazy traffic on
that one the longest I've ever spent in a traffic jam,
and additional to the time that it would have taken
together there was maybe a couple hours, and it was
(25:20):
in the DC area. Yeah, that's four hours is pretty intent.
You were driving in d C man through d and
the road is a disaster. It's crazy up through there.
Oh that's the last thing. Oh I have to mention. Okay,
I don't know if anybody else does this, but when
(25:41):
I'm driving, I am pretty I'll be pretty forgiving or
judgmental based on the county and the state of license
plates in our city. If I see someone making a
foolish left hand turn and their license plate tells me
that they're from out of town, I get it. You
may not know that that became a turn lane. You
(26:03):
may not know there wasn't interns that kind of stuff
because you're unfamiliar. But if I see somebody with city
plates and they are doing something shy sty, they're driving poorly,
then they're doing it on very much. I'm back to
mad Max. Yeah, and they shall be judged. I'm with
(26:24):
you on that always. So yes, let us know your
war stories. We want to hear from you. You can
find us on Facebook and Instagram at car Stuff hs
W and the website is car Stuff Show dot com
and check out our Facebook community, especially because we've got
some great long time listeners there. We've got some expert
(26:45):
gear heads, and we have some uh, we have some
fantastic cars amongst our listening things to do. You check
it out, Thanks everyone, and we'll see you next time.
Car Stuff is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
(27:07):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to Car Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios.
How Stuff works. Well, folks, by now you know what
that music means. Welcome back to car Stuff. I am
one of your hosts today, Ben Bullet, and I'm Kurt
Darren and Kurt, I've got to tell you you and
I are both pretty fortunate when it comes to our
(00:23):
commutes in this our fair metropolis of Atlanta. How far
away would you say you are from the office minute wise?
A mile? One important distinction, and I recognize a local one.
I hear one. Man, I would say four miles, So
that would be between fifteen minutes and an hour, right depending,
(00:43):
Because as we know, if you are like anyone else
living in Atlanta, from the wealthiest person to the poorest person,
the oldest and the youngest of drivers, then you are
in an eternal battle with this city's sworn nemis. This
that is traffic. You know. I'm not gonna leave you
(01:03):
hanging out there, man, I will. I'll give you my
side of the story too. Right now, I live in
the same neighborhood where our offices, and traffic is so
bad in this neighborhood that it is honestly faster for
me to walk a lot of places than it is
to drive, especially during rush hour, which is I think
(01:24):
when you're four mile commute stretches to an hour. Right
and before then, when our office many years ago was
located in a different neighborhood closer to downtown Atlanta, I
had a commute that could easily stretch to an hour
and thirty minutes. And it was one of those things
(01:46):
where it didn't matter what side streets I took, It
didn't matter what kind of shortcuts I used, Like if
I didn't leave by four pm, I was just going
to stay there until at least six thirty. In previous
episodes of Car Stuff, Kurt, we've covered different aspects of traffic,
the best worst cities for drivers, world's largest traffic jams,
(02:08):
on and on and on. But today you and I
are going to look at something just a bit different.
It's a question for many of our fellow listeners to
ponder while you are stuck in traffic, because I was
thinking about this, man, what do you think the odds
are that someone listening to today's episode is listening while
they were in grid luck? The odds are pretty high,
(02:31):
do you think so? Well, try not to let the
road rage get you. Today, we are tackling this question
how much does traffic actually cost us here in the US,
both as individuals and as a country. To answer that question,
we have to look like everybody knows what traffic is, Kurt.
(02:52):
If you and I were stuck in traffic and someone
was explaining to us what traffic is, I might get
a little irritated it. So let's cut past that, and
let's just go to traffic jams. And what's one of
the biggest first questions we have about them? Why are
traffic jams so prevalent. The simple answer would be there's
a lot of cars on the road. However, there are
(03:14):
complexities to that. And here in Atlanta, we have eight
lanes of traffic on either side of the Inner States,
and traffic still somehow gets bottle necked. So the jam
is going to be happening way ahead of you, probably
where two lanes maybe exit onto another interstate, and folks
wait till the last minute to get over into those
two lanes, and someone has to hit their brakes, and
(03:35):
basically there's this domino effect that ripples back into traffic
and causes a jam for miles and miles back. I
guess that's the easiest everyday example. Yeah, and then you know,
as people drive and take the make these risky moves
to get over to the exit, accident may happen. So
then you have compounded the issue, you have a bottleneck,
and then you have an accident. You can easily see
(03:57):
how traffic can get out of hand when there's a
bunch of cars on the road, So it's not just
the amount of cars, it's myriad other factors. Yeah, yeah,
I like that you're pointing out the perfect word for this, compounding,
because just like compounding interests, those little taps on the
brake pedal add up. There's an increational, as you said,
(04:18):
domino effect that applies such that this little tap on
the brakes maybe a short a short pause, call it
two to three seconds. Right the car in front of
you stopped suddenly, so you have to tap your brakes
just two or three seconds, and then you all start
to roll along. I mean twenty miles you get up
(04:40):
to that, but everybody behind you is also tapping their brakes,
and they have to tap them for a longer amount
of time, until you could be as far as a
mile back and everybody has stopped This is a thing
that we can't really blame on one person. It's a
group behavior. And things get more complicated, and we ask
(05:01):
why there are so many cars and why are the
roads overloaded despite the fact that we build so many
extra lanes. Were continually Uh, We're continually trying to make
bigger and better roads and trying to maintain them. Our pal,
Jonathan Strickland is a podcaster, longtime colleague of ours, friend
(05:24):
of the show. He's been on Car Stuff a number
of times. He hosts a show called tech Stuff and
a couple of other podcasts here at I Heart Radio.
He also, before we even started podcasting, he would write
articles for our parent website, How Stuff Works, and he
wrote an article called how Traffic Works, which is a
(05:45):
pretty good read. Don't let him know that I said this.
Jonathan is a pretty sharp guy, and the way that
he breaks it down, there are two broad concepts of
play when we talk about traffic jams. The first is
network overload. The second is traffic disturbances. Network overload. It's
(06:05):
the fancy phrase for the idea that we already proposed,
and that is simply demand and supply right demand for
room on the road supply of room on the road,
there are these bottlenecks where traffic just inevitably seems to
exceed the road's capability to handle cars. That happens a
(06:25):
lot here in Atlanta. We've got a bunch of two
to four lane surface streets where a lot of people
want to make left turns, but there are no left
hand turned signals. And you probably in your own commute
have some bottlenecks that you've run into. Oh for sure.
The road that I take home is a four lane road.
(06:47):
There aren't left turn lane, so it's just divided, you know,
it's like a little divided highway. And it's a fairly
major back road into downtown Atlanta to and from, And
so as far as network overload goes that, there's just
a bunch of people trying to get to the same place.
And like you said, problems will arise with the whole
left turn thing, and people need to get to their
(07:07):
neighborhood and they need to turn left to do it,
and there may or may not be a left turn
ere there. So you have cars stacking up behind this
person turning left, and then inevitably they're gonna want to
get over into the right lane to ease around the
person turning left. It's that ripple effect. It just goes
back and back, and then then you put other stoplights
into the equation. That's a mess. Yeah, and think about
(07:28):
this hypothetical moment. Let's put ourselves in this situation. So
you're trying to get around someone who is making a
left hand turn. You see a space that opens up
right in the right lane, and you can accelerate and
escape this congestion. The person behind you can accelerate a
few minutes later, the person behind them can accelerate a
(07:48):
few moments after that. Right these other people in the
right lane that you you got in front of. This
doesn't mean the congestion immediately clears up, although it feels
like it does, because we're generally looking forward in our cars.
Behind us, this problem is just traveling in the other directions,
traveling behind us this congestion. And this is something called
(08:12):
the traffic wave effect. Imagine the domino effect on wheels,
but also the escalating agglomerative nature of the snowball effect,
where the problem worsens the further and further it goes.
So that's the first thing, network overload. Second thing, traffic
disturbances are exactly what they sound like, right, that is
(08:34):
a broad term. Immediately my mind goes to accidents, fender benders,
things of that nature, sometimes caused by the network overload itself. Yeah,
that's that's the thing that I think most of us
think of right now. And going back to you listener
there in traffic, I'm sure that if you live in
(08:54):
a city like ours, in your commute, you will see
at least one or two acts, dents hopefully everyone's okay,
or breakdowns, you know, a flat tire, overheated engine, something
like that. You will also see road construction and repair
that counts as a traffic disturbance. And you'll see harsh
(09:14):
weather conditions, which you know, our city gets a hard
time for because it just takes a little bit of
snow and the city shuts down. When was that two
thousand fourteen, they called it the snow apocalypse. Yeah, we can't.
The thing about traffic disturbances that differentiates them from network
overload is that we can, with enough study and analysis,
(09:40):
understand and predict network overload these inevitable bottlenecks, But we
cannot predict traffic disturbances. Although we cannot predict traffic disturbances,
we can say that they always spell problems for commuters.
No one is ever driving down a six lane highway
(10:01):
to see two of the lanes in their direction closed
off and going, oh, great, construction, awesome. You know, I'm
harping on Atlanta because that's where we have our daily
driving experience. But no one in this city sees those
famous metal plates on the road and says, oh great,
what a good job. I'm starting to get the feeling
(10:21):
that they're more of a permanent fix than a temporary fix.
But this is a giant metal plate that's placed over
a hole for an indefinite amount of time that the
county city d O T makes in the road, and
you don't really want to hit it going full speed,
so it's a slow down and thus the domino effect
behind you will take place. But these appear all over
(10:42):
the place, and often unannounced. I mean, you hit it
one time and you know it's there, but the first
time to me is always a surprise. There's actually one
right at the entrance to my neighborhood, so flied over
that on my way home. Um one other sidebar. Don't
mean to throw us too far off, but I finally
saw this phenomenon a couple of weekends ago, and it
(11:06):
was a rainy Sunday. I was driving down five, Interstate
five that goes around Atlanta, and um, I'm driving and
I see a pair of headlights coming in my direction. Yes,
so I finally saw the phenomenon of the car driving
down the wrong side of the interstate, which happens more
than you think two eighty five. I don't even know
(11:28):
how this car got Holy smokes, that's fast and furious
level dangerous. Yeah. Yeah, So the rest of the day,
I'm checking the news to see what happened with this
going down the wrong side of five. They never heard
anything of it. Again, were they in this slow? I mean,
what do you think this? Get this? This person was
(11:51):
in the left shoulder. There's maybe a eight or nine
foot retaining wall concrete the in between that in the
left lane, and they were going fairly quickly. I guess
they realized they were going the wrong way. That's why
they weren't on the road. I don't even know how
you get off from the left lane going the wrong way.
(12:12):
I just don't know how. I don't know how you
get on and then from there, I know how you
would get off. Yeah, because you get off, you have
to cut across the entirety of traffic in that direction,
which is a six lanes maybe this is right there
at spaghetti junction area. So that first off, I'm glad
(12:32):
you're okay. Uh. Secondly, everybody listening, please please please pay
attention to the wrong way signs. I know, traffic signs
can seem overall kind of negative. It's you know, no
turn here, no you turn wrong way, that kind of stuff. Really,
if you think about it, the only positive traffic sign
(12:53):
is the one that says keep going. Just the steer
us back on horse here. Um. So, traffic signs, that's
one thing that could um alleviate some of this network
overload that we were talking about. D O T and
work crews do their best to alert people to oncoming construction.
(13:15):
So you know, two miles ahead to two left lanes closed,
right lanes close ahead. Yeah, days ahead. Even even with accidents,
you have the signs accidents center lane three miles before
this exit. Why do folks wait till the last minute
to get over I'm gonna give the benefit of the
downton to the driver and say they were focused so
(13:37):
much on what they were doing that they didn't see
the sign. You know, they're looking at the road, eyes forward,
just paying attention because there's a lot going on. However,
if you move over early, it releases some of this
stop and go attention that we feel that gets escalated
the further back you go down the road. I completely
agree with your with what you're saying, but I think
for some people they feel that if they get over
(13:58):
to the right because the left lane is closed or
something two miles ahead, they feel like they're getting in
a longer line and it's gonna be slower and they
should just push the issue, drive as close to the
closure as possible, zip in at the last second. It's
also true, technically traffic is better for everyone if every
driver practices the zipper merge. But the zipper merge doesn't
(14:22):
happen in Atlanta. Atlanta is a very difficult city to
drive in because, for some reason, people who drive here,
and honestly myself included, I'm not going to throw stones
in this glasshouse. For some reason, all of us have
this sort of mad Max mentality when it comes to
the road and I know the road that you take home, dude,
(14:45):
I have been on that road. I used to have
that commute. People are monsters on that one windy and
they're very close lanes. They're not as wide as a
lot of other streets here in Atlanta. What does this
all mean? How does this work out? We a stat
for you. According to the two thousand and seven Urban
Mobility Report from the Texas Transportation Institute, traffic incidents counted
(15:09):
for between fifty two and fifty eight percent of the
delays we all experience in traffic. What that means is,
while there may be these unavoidable bottlenecks, you know what
I mean, like two interstate exits that are very close
to one another, exited entrance ramps, and you know something
where everybody has to try to go left while everybody's
(15:29):
trying to go right. While those bottlenecks do exist, more
than half of the reasons that we have traffic jams
are going to be those traffic incidents, road construction accidents, breakdowns,
things like that. However, there's another factor at play here,
and this comes to us from a private industry traffic
(15:50):
analysts called en rics I n R i X. This
was referenced in another House of Works article by our
contributing writer Sharre three Wit, who is a top notch
expert on all things automotive. So in Rex has their
own term for a network overload. It's a traffic hot spot.
(16:11):
According to in Rex, these traffic hot spots are responsible
for huge amounts of traffic congestion and huge amounts of
lost cash. We know a little bit about how they
started to break down the concept of traffic and how
they ultimately arrived at a financial answer, So we're gonna
(16:36):
walk through how they figured out what a traffic hot
spot was, how they analyzed it, and then ultimately how
much it costs. In two thousand and seventeen, Rics launched
a US transportation study. They called it the Health of
the Road. So they had to define what a hot
spot was. Um Interrics used a cloud based traffic analysis
tool called Roadway Analytics. They analyzed the areas with frequent
(16:59):
track jams, and they narrowed those down to spots where
the speeds were typically observed to drop below six pc
of normal of the non congested speed for at least
two minutes. If, for instance, they're looking at a road
where the speed limit is fifty five, if it drops
below of that from more than two minutes. It's a
(17:20):
traffic hot spot, right, yeah, yeah, in a hot spot,
traffic will slow less than half its usual pace. And
the study also looked at the economic costs in terms
of wasted time, lost fuel, and carbon emissions over the
next decade. So that kind of describes what they consider
to be cost. I guess because we have cost on
our you know, well being as well being. Sure, yeah,
(17:43):
it's a yeah, it's a it's an umbrella term. Well,
here's where the rubber hits the road, folks and the
nation's wallet. If you live near a city and you
also drive a car, you can't do very much to
avoid traffic. It's just there with you. It's gonna follow
you like a shadow. A two thousand seven studies showed
that in twenty eight urban areas across the US, drivers
(18:07):
spend get this, an entire work week's worth of time
sitting in traffic each year. So that means for almost
thirty cities in the US, you're losing an entire week,
five days of your life sitting in your car. So,
you know, make sure you have a comfortable one, make
(18:28):
sure you have a reliable one, make sure you can
listen to podcast while you're driving. The worst example we
found was Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, drivers lose almost
two weeks a year to traffic, and this does have
(18:49):
serious consequences. I'm glad you mentioned people's personal well being here, Kurt.
It's tough to put a price on that, but we
can estimate the cost of traffic through a couple of
different lenses. In two thousand five, the estimated cost of
traffic to the nation was more than seventy eight billion
in fuel and wasted time alone. So that's like, we
(19:13):
take the average income of someone you know for a
work week, and then we say, well, this is the
money that could have been made if they weren't stuck
in their vehicle. And then we also say this is
the amount of you know, like, this is the price
for gallon of fuel, how many cars were delayed? This
how much the fuel cost. Add those numbers together and
(19:34):
get seventy eight billion. It's missing important things. Doesn't factor
in stuff like damage to the environment possibly still kind
of hard to quantify, And it doesn't factor in health cost,
whether that is your physical health or your mental health,
you know what I mean. I'm sure there have been
a couple of people who went to a therapist or
(19:55):
something because of their road range. And what about wear
and tear on the roads are you could call? Yeah,
So Americans bought two point nine billion extra gallons of
gas because of traffic congestion than two thousand and five.
And the average annual cost to an individual driver was
seven ten dollars. And that's just due to the extra
(20:16):
time he spent on the road because of congestion. Yeah,
and let's go back to in RECs, let's look at
let's drill down into a specific example. In RECs found
that the single worst traffic hot spot in the country,
the single worst network overload instance or bottleneck, is near Fredericksburg, Virginia.
(20:37):
It's on Interstate South at exit one thirty three A.
And technically, I don't know it's true, but technically that
means that if you are stuck in traffic right now
and listening to this show, you have a higher than
average likelihood of being gridlocked there at South exite. Anybody
(21:00):
who's been through that, right to us, I mean right
to us when you're not driving, let us know if
this thing is as much of a bruiser as it sounds.
Because in Fredericksburg, Virginia. At that one spot. In the
entire country, drivers are losing an estimated two point three
(21:20):
billion dollars through twenty six. Two point three billion dollars
one stretch of Interstate Exit one thirty three A two
point three billions. That's crazy, and the numbers get higher
to right. In conclusion, the report said that across all
twenty five cities that they studied, traffic hot spots will
(21:42):
cost drivers four hundred and eighty billion dollars during the
next ten years and lost time, wasted fuel, and carbon admitted.
When that is broadened out across the country as a whole,
the cost of these hot spots is expected to reach
Kurt Kirk Kirk, can we get a drum roll real quick? Yes? Yes,
(22:04):
So the cost of these hot spots is expected to
reach two point two trillion dollars. That's trillion with a
t two point to trillion dollars. Is that even real money?
At that point? I can't, I can't. Are there trillionaires?
Is there someone with a trillion dollars? And that is
(22:26):
a real number, two point two trillion dollars. That's the
answer to today's episode. If you look at the cost
of lost time waste. If fuel carbon admitted from now
to it's going to hit two point to trillion dollars
in expenses. And of course that is an incomplete number.
(22:50):
We can't put a genuine hard number on the quality
of time loss to traffic, right because we can say
a work week. We can a person makes so and
so per hour or per year and do the math
that way, But we can't put a price on the
time that drivers could be spending with their family, their friends,
(23:12):
their loved ones. We can't put a price on, you know,
the cost of going to a psychiatrist because of your
traffic nightmares. And of course I don't know if we can,
but we have not yet put an annual cost on
the court cases for road rage. Hopefully we're kidding, but
you know there's stuff we can't price out right, and
(23:34):
that at risk of driving in congested areas is Yeah.
We didn't even mention the cost of insurance, which changes
based on where you live, and a lot of that
is due to you know, reports the crime or accidents. Right,
So there ends our story. Hopefully the congestion that you
(23:54):
were in while you were listening to today show has
eased up. A bit you're getting back up to you've
made it through your local traffic hot spot, and you've
only paid a bit of that two point two trillion
dollars in lost time. And this ends our episode, but
not our show. We want to know your traffic war stories.
(24:16):
What is the worst traffic jam you've ever been in? Briefly,
let's see. I think the worst one that I was
ever in probably was about not too bad. Actually it's
about four hours. It was about four hours I got
stuck in traffic on an interstate where there was a
(24:39):
major accident, and I was I was really irritated about
it until in the distance, like several miles ahead, I
saw a helicopter taking off, and I realized that whoever
was in that accident, it was getting a life flight
to a hospital. And that put things in perspective that
(25:00):
I mean, think, you know what, being four hours late
or being held up like that is still better than
being in a terrible accident, So everybody stays safe. I
don't know, Kurt, do you have any crazy traffic on
that one the longest I've ever spent in a traffic jam,
and additional to the time that it would have taken
together there was maybe a couple hours, and it was
(25:20):
in the DC area. Yeah, that's four hours is pretty intent.
You were driving in d C man through d and
the road is a disaster. It's crazy up through there.
Oh that's the last thing. Oh I have to mention. Okay,
I don't know if anybody else does this, but when
(25:41):
I'm driving, I am pretty I'll be pretty forgiving or
judgmental based on the county and the state of license
plates in our city. If I see someone making a
foolish left hand turn and their license plate tells me
that they're from out of town, I get it. You
may not know that that became a turn lane. You
(26:03):
may not know there wasn't interns that kind of stuff
because you're unfamiliar. But if I see somebody with city
plates and they are doing something shy sty, they're driving poorly,
then they're doing it on very much. I'm back to
mad Max. Yeah, and they shall be judged. I'm with
(26:24):
you on that always. So yes, let us know your
war stories. We want to hear from you. You can
find us on Facebook and Instagram at car Stuff hs
W and the website is car Stuff Show dot com
and check out our Facebook community, especially because we've got
some great long time listeners there. We've got some expert
(26:45):
gear heads, and we have some uh, we have some
fantastic cars amongst our listening things to do. You check
it out, Thanks everyone, and we'll see you next time.
Car Stuff is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
(27:07):
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