Study: Traffic costs billions of hours a year

Small, mid-size cities not immune to problem.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Los Angeles for years has had the nation's worst traffic jams, but these days even the streets and highways in small and medium cities from Brownsville, Texas, to Anchorage, Alaska, to Honolulu, Hawaii, are giving rush-hour drivers fits.

Snarled traffic is costing travelers in the 85 biggest U.S. cities a whopping 3.5 billion hours a year, up from 700 million two decades ago.

The problem worsened over the past two decades in small, medium and large cities, according to the Texas Transportation Institute's annual Urban Mobility Report released Tuesday. The institute, part of Texas A&M University, looked at data from 1982 to 2002.

Over that period, the study recorded the greatest leap in congestion in Dallas, from 13 hours annually in 1982 for the average peak-period traveler to 61 hours annually in 2002, and in Riverside, California, from nine hours annually per rush-hour traveler in 1982 to 57 hours on average in 2002.

The average urban traveler was stuck in road traffic 46 hours a year in 2002, a 187 percent increase over the 16 hours lost in 1982.

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Even in cities with the least bad congestion -- Anchorage, Alaska, and Brownsville, Texas -- drivers lost five hours a year to traffic. In medium-sized cities such as Honolulu it was 18 hours.



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