Grrridlock: Yes, you are stuck in traffic more often

Bart Jansen | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Better economy to blame for worst traffic ever More jobs and cheaper gasoline come with a big, honking downside: U.S. roads are more clogged than ever now that the recession is in the rearview mirror. (Aug. 26)

Washington, D.C., beat out commuting misery stalwarts Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York for the dubious honor of worst rush hour congestion in the country, a nationwide traffic study found.

Rush hour congestion adds 82 hours of suffering each year to the average commute around Washington, D.C., according to the study by Texas A&M Transportation Institute and Inrix, a Kirkland, Wash., company that analyzes travel data. Other cities plagued by gridlock include Los Angeles, where motorists spend an extra 80 hours commuting, San Francisco with its 78 hours of delays, and New York with 74 hours.

Overall, drivers lose nearly 7 billion hours each year to traffic congestion – an average of 42 hours per commuter – and waste 3 billion gallons of fuel, according to the 2015 Urban Mobility Scorecard.

"I think it's pretty clear people are frustrated," Tim Lomax, a co-author of the report at the institute, told USA TODAY. "It's not just the average time. It's that you have to plan around 45 minutes for a trip that ought to take 15 or 20."

The average delay has doubled since 1985, the study found. For cities with less than 500,000 people, delays have quadrupled, the study found. By 2020, average delays will grow to 47 hours and the total delay will climb to 8.3 billion hours, the study projected.

The report calculated its findings with Inrix records of traffic speeds for 471 urban areas taken every 15 minutes throughout the day. Also, states provide data on traffic volume and congestion to the Federal Highway Administration.

Not all big cities are clogged with cars. Cleveland and Pittsburgh each had less congestion than anticipated for their populations, Lomax said. In both cases, the former manufacturing hubs built roads for larger populations that have drifted away. The roads, Lomax said, are a "a relic of where they were."

San Diego and Tampa have good road networks despite larger populations, Lomax said. San Diego uses ramp metering to restrict access to freeways, coordinates traffic signals and pays attention to clearing crashes and stalled vehicles from the road, he said. San Diego's system "has always operated better than you might expect for such a big place," he said.

Some smaller cities find themselves in the same traffic-snarled company as their sky-scrapered counterparts. Traffic in Baton Rouge and Austin is out of proportion to their populations, he said.

Baton Rouge got a flood of people who evacuated New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, but the city's traffic, with 47 hours of average delays, has worsened, Lomax said. Austin, with an average 52 hours of delays, has had a strategy for decades of not building additional roads to discourage more people from moving in, he said.

"It seems to have not worked very well at all," Lomax said of Austin. "An average day is terrible, and if you get weather or a car crash, it can lock down the freeway."

The report comes as Congress debates the next long-term highway funding bill. Lawmakers have not reached an agreement on how to fund more road construction and repairs. Federal highway bill funding expires Oct. 29.

One option to reduce traffic is to invest more money in roads and transit to meet population growth and economic expansion. But the report notes that adding capacity isn't enough. In many large cities, such as Washington, D.C., and its suburbs, there isn't enough room to add more roads.

"Businesses can give their employees more flexibility in where, when and how they work, individual workers can adjust their commuting patterns, and we can have better thinking when it comes to long-term land use planning," Lomax said. "This problem calls for a classic all-hands-on-deck approach."