Many Drive Times Getting Longer

When it comes to traffic congestion around Washington, even the good news is bad, and it goes downhill from there, according to an article by Ashley Halsey III at The Washington Post.

The city that so hungers to be No. 1 at something — usually on a gridiron or diamond-shaped field — has again risen to the top as the most congested metropolitan area in the United States, a place where the average driver burns 67 hours and 32 gallons of gas each year sitting in traffic.

The No. 1 ranking is the good news. The bad news is that it’s going to get worse.

The annual crunching of numbers by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute projects that unless something is done about traffic, the economic recovery will put more wheels on the road and create more congestion. By 2020, analysts say, the average U.S. driver will spend an additional seven hours in traffic each year and waste six more gallons of gas.

The Institute’s calculations are based on data from transponders on millions of moving vehicles. It comes from Inrix, the commercial network that also provides much of the information used in traffic reports on radio, television and the Internet.

After Washington, the four most congested metro areas in the nation were among the perennial contenders: Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Boston. Raleigh-Durham rated as the easiest major city to get around.

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