Telematics is helping fleets reduce traffic congestion problems, but there’s no miracle cure available yet to solve it completely. As congestion increases, it’s causing fleets to dig into data metrics, driver training, routing, and telematics applications to reduce the lost time and excess fuel consumption. As for the most congested US cities, traffic information and services provider Inrix released its 2012 Traffic Scorecard. Researchers at Texas A&M Transportation had similar findings in its recently issued Urban Mobility report.
To make the Inrix list, the analytical factors are population density, average time spent commuting, and the percentage of the population that drives to work. It’s based on the amount of time added to the commute during peak traffic time. New York could have made the top of the list with its 34.9 minute average longest daily commute, and Washington DC would have been up there too at 34.5 minutes. The availability of dependable public transportation in those markets moved them down a bit on the ranking.
It’s no shocker to see Los Angeles topping the list, though it’s interesting to see it competing with Honolulu for the top spot. Honolulu replaced LA as number one a year ago, and this time it made it back to where it had previously been. Here’s this year’s least of the most congested cities and their traffic index numbers:
1. Los Angeles – 28.8
2. Honolulu – 26
3. San Francisco – 23.5
4. Austin, Texas – 20.7
5. New York City – 19.9
6. Bridgeport, Conn. – 19.1
7. San Jose, Calif. – 17.6
8. Seattle – 17.6
9. Washington, DC – 16.4
10. Boston – 14.7
For the Texas A&M Transportation Institute report, Washington, DC topped the list, followed by Los Angeles, San Francisco-Oakland, New York-Newark, and Boston. The report states that the total financial cost of congestion in 2011 was $121 billion, up one billion dollars from the previous year. For that total, $27 billion of it came from wasted time and diesel fuel from commercial trucks on roads.
