May 10, 2005
AND WORSE:
Study Shows Traffic Keeps Getting Worse (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 5/10/05)
Sitting in traffic, an annoying part of life in many big cities, is becoming a major headache in places not usually lumped in with New York, Washington and Los Angeles.Posted by Orrin Judd at May 10, 2005 11:55 AMTake Omaha, Neb. Each year, motorists in one of the country's most wide-open states spend the equivalent of nearly a full day in highway gridlock, according to the annual Urban Mobility Report released Monday by the Texas Transportation Institute.
Omaha is among a growing list of metropolitan areas where drivers are delayed at least 20 hours a year. There are 51 such places now, compared to just five in 1982. Among some of the newer entries: Colorado Springs, Colo.; Virginia Beach, Va.; Charleston, S.C.; New Haven, Conn.; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; Salt Lake City; and Cincinnati.
''That's where the growth is,'' said Tim Lomax, one of the report's co-authors. ''The medium cities are about 10-15 years behind the big cities.''
And 10-15 years is about how long it takes to complete transportation projects that reduce congestion, Lomax said.
There are, give or take, 240 days in a work year, so 24 hours of congestion works out to .1 hours per day, or, assuming that the drive to work and the drive home are equally congested, .05 hours per one-way trip. Somehow, I suspect this article wouldn't have been posted if the finding had been that commuters in some relatively large cities only had to sit in traffic for 3 minutes on their way to work.
Posted by: David Cohen at May 10, 2005 12:26 PMIt's three entire work days alone that could be spent in society.
Posted by: oj at May 10, 2005 12:31 PM20 hours a year is less than 5 minutes a day. That's 5 minutes for talk radio or singing.
Much better than 20 extra minutes waiting for the bus.
Posted by: pj at May 10, 2005 12:43 PMOr they could be spent surfing the Internet. Joe to Society: take the hint and go away.
Posted by: joe shropshire at May 10, 2005 12:52 PMHey, when I'm stuck in traffic, I fire up my Treo and read Brothers Judd blog, so I actually look forward to being stuck in traffic!!!
Posted by: Bret at May 10, 2005 1:09 PMSpending much time in society these days, OJ.
Posted by: David Cohen at May 10, 2005 3:27 PMLoads. I'm a Little League Dad.
Posted by: oj at May 10, 2005 4:02 PMI note that OJ is still avoiding the issue of why wasting 20-30 minutes a day waiting for public transport is better than wasting 3 minutes a day in traffic. She Who Is Perfect In All Ways is trying the bus these days and it's a major hassle in terms of scheduling. But I guess it's better for the kids to spend an extra hour in daycare if Mom is a couple minutes late to the bus stop. More socializing. And of course, she can never pick up the kids and come home early, because the buses don't run that route at non-peak times.
P.S. I'll also note that for us, any trip is faster by car even if one counts time spent parking but not time spent waiting for the bus.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at May 10, 2005 4:56 PMAs you might guess from this article, it is scientifically impossible to overestimate how gawdawful Omaha traffic is: it's Satan's own road system. The complicated, traffic-jamming funhouse of cones and detours the wise men call "road construction" multiplies every year, with new projects coming in while old projects just hang around and collect construction workers as they build ever-greater monuments to the God of Getting Nothing Done.
A high-school teacher of mine who regularly traveled all over the country once said he'd never seen roads as bad as Omaha's. Hurry up with the flying cars, already.
Posted by: Matt Murphy at May 11, 2005 1:22 AMYou're a little autistic, aren't you?
Posted by: joe shropshire at May 11, 2005 1:31 AMLessee now— In a lot of places, we've had several decades of influential groups whose political goal is to make traffic worse, and people are shocked, SHOCKED! that traffic has gotten worse. Sheesh.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at May 11, 2005 1:44 AMAspergic
Posted by: oj at May 11, 2005 7:25 AM