D.C. Area in Tie for Second-Worst Traffic in Nation
By Jonathan Mummolo Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 18, 2007; 11:30 AM
The spirit-sapping, schedule-scuttling congestion of the Washington area has grown so severe that the region is now in a tie for the second-worst traffic in the nation — a notch higher on an ignominious chart no city aims to top. Only drivers in freeway-filled Los Angeles endure rush hour delays more brutal than Washingtonians, according to a national study released today.
Washington and Atlanta pulled into a second-place tie with the San Francisco-Oakland region, which had held strong in second place for years, according to a report by the Texas Transportation Institute of 2005 conditions. Drivers in all three areas sit in gridlock for an average of 60 hours a year, equivalent to a week-and-a-half of work — or vacation.
The Washington area had been No. 3 in the previous study.
“We’re the world’s capital with world-class gridlock,” said John B. Townsend II, public and government affairs manager for AAA Mid-Atlantic.
The numbers for Washington area drivers are cringe worthy: They sat through more than 127 million hours of delays at a cost of $1,094 per rush-hour traveler. They wasted nearly 91 million gallons of fuel. A projected 218 lane miles or 74 million more transit riderswould have to be added each year just to maintain current congestion levels.
Though changes in the report’s methodology resulted in Washingtonians spending fewer hours stuck in congestion than in previous studies, things are most assuredly not improving, the authors cautioned.
On the contrary, the new analysis shows a worsening picture, with the area’s delay figures and national rank climbing steadily since the report first came out in 1984. A generation ago, Washington area drivers sat through a paltry 16 hours of congestion, placing the region at a respectable 18th in the nation. By 1985, the region had cracked the top 10 and by 1994 it was in the top five.
The Washington region is “afflicted with economic prosperity,” said the study’s co-author, Timothy J. Lomax. “Booming economies almost always see rapid growth and congestion . . . It’s a lot easier to put up an office building or a subdivision or a shopping center than it is to put in the transportation system needed to serve all that travel.”
Though increasingly difficult to thwart, the causes of congestion are not mysterious. The report cites large populations, shipping demands, slow construction of new roads and transit and such events crashes, breakdowns and bad weather that cause unpredictable delays.
Lomax noted that the delay figures account for all rush-hour travelers — whether they are riding their bikes to the corner store or sitting in a bumper-to-bumper nightmare on the way to the office — meaning that many area drivers well exceed the 60-hour average.
Overall, the study found a nation lodged in traffic jams. “Congestion . . . is getting worse in regions of all sizes,” the study states, and it reports staggering figures at the national level: 4.2 billion hours of delays, an increase of 200 million hours from 2004; 2.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel; and an annual cost of $710 per traveler, up from an inflation-adjusted $260 in 1982.
Perhaps most discouragingly for the Washington area, many of the solutions suggested in the report — using mass transit and HOV lanes, telecommuting, building new roads and relieving chokepoints — are already being done. Even with a new Woodrow Wilson Bridge, Springfield interchange and plans to expand Metro rail in Northern Virginia and build a new 18-mile highway across the Maryland suburbs, there are simply too many people to move from here to there.
“We’re not even close to keeping up, much less catching up,” said Alan Pisarski, a traffic analyst from Fairfax County, who has authored the “Commuting in America” series. “We’ve just got such a dramatic backlog of work to be done.”
Good news was hard to find in the report. Even Atlanta’s apparent improvement in certain categories isn’t cause for celebration, experts said. Yearly congestion in the Georgia metropolis dropped from a revised 73 hours to 60 hours between 2000 and 2005. While Lomax said that drop was partly due to increased service patrols, experts caution that the figures are likely due to the expanding geography of the region into more rural areas and a rapid growth in population, both of which would water down per-capita averages.
“I wouldn’t be looking to Atlanta as a model of the solution,” Pisarski said.
The study is sponsored by the American Public Transportation Association, the American Road and Transportation Builders Association and the University Transportation Center for Mobility and is based on data compiled by state and federal traffic agencies in 437 urban areas. Its results are obtained by comparing traffic counts and miles of road lanes to estimate congestion levels.
This year’s report employs a number of methodological changes and includes data from more localities and revised population estimates. For the Washington region, it also incorporates newly available data from the Virginia Department of Transportation and the Maryland State Highway Administration, Lomax said.
Ronald F. Kirby, director of transportation planning at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments said he was hesitant to place too much weight on Washington’s shifting rank given the change in technique by the study’s authors.
“I guess my question would be, ‘Is the change in ranking real, or a result of the different methodology?’ ” Kirby said.
Kirby, whose organization has released a regional report based on aerial photographs since 1993, said Washington congestion is indeed worsening overall, but that it is very time- and location-specific and has actually improved in some spots.
There is one cause for hope: Washington is unlikely to ever overtake Los Angeles, where drivers spend a whopping 72 hours a year mired in delays.
