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Just the steers back on course here.
So traffic signs, that's one thing that could
alleviate some of this network overload
that we were talking about.
DOT and work crews do their best to alert people
to oncoming construction.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So you know, two miles ahead.
Two left lanes closed.
All right, lanes closed.
Days ahead.
Yeah, days ahead, even.
Even with accidents, you had the signs, accident,
sinter lane, three miles before this exit.
Why the folks wait till the last minute to get over?
Now, I'm going to give the benefit of the doubting
to the driver and say they were focused so much
on what they were doing that they didn't see the sign.
And they're looking at the road.
Eyes forward, just paying attention.
Because there's a lot going on.
However, if you move over early, it releases some of this stop
and go tension that we feel that gets escalated
further back, you go down the road.
I completely agree with you with what you're saying.
But I think for some people, they feel
that if they get over to the right
because the left lane's closed or something two miles ahead,
they feel like they're getting in a longer line
and it's going to be slower.
And they should just push the issue.
Drive is close to the closure as possible.
Zip in at the last second.
It's also true, technically, traffic is better for everyone
if every driver practices the zipper merge.
But the zipper merge doesn't happen in Atlanta.
Atlanta's a very difficult city to drive in
because for some reason, people who drive here
and honestly, myself included,
I'm not going to throw stones in this glass house.
For some reason, all of us have this sort of mad max mentality
when it comes to the road.
And I know the road that you take home, dude.
I have been on that road.
I used to have that commute.
People are monsters on that one.
Strickies, windy.
And they're very close lanes.
They're not as wide as a lot of other streets here in Atlanta.
What does this all mean?
How does this work out?
We have a stat for you.
According to the 2007 Urban Mobility Report
from the Texas Transportation Institute traffic incidents
counted for between 52 and 58% of the delays
we all experience in traffic.
What that means is while there may be
these unavoidable bottlenecks, you know what I mean?
Like two interstate exits that are very close
to one another, exit and entrance ramps
and something where everybody has to try to go left
while everybody's trying to go right.
While those bottlenecks do exist
more than half of the reasons that we have traffic jams
are going to be those traffic incidents.
Road construction, accidents, breakdowns, things like that.
However, there's another factor at play here
and this comes to us from a private industry traffic
analyst called InRix, I-N-R-I-X.
This was referenced in another House of Works article
by our contributing writer Sherees Threewitt
who is a top notch expert on all things automotive.
So InRix has their own term for a network overload.
It's a traffic hotspot.
According to InRix, these traffic hotspots
are responsible for huge amounts of traffic congestion
and huge amounts of lost cash.
We know a little bit about how they started
to break down the concept of traffic
and how they ultimately arrived at a financial answer.
So we're going to walk through how they figured out
what a traffic hotspot was, how they analyzed it,
and then ultimately, how much it costs.
In 2017, InRix launched a US transportation study.
They called it the health of the road.
So they had to define what a hotspot was.
InRix used a cloud-based traffic analysis tool
called roadway analytics.
They analyzed the areas with frequent traffic jams
and they narrowed those down to spots
where the speeds were typically observed
to drop below 65% of normal of the non-congested speed
for at least two minutes.
If, for instance, they're looking at a road
where the speed limit is 55,
if it drops below 65% of that from more than two minutes,
it's a traffic hotspot, right?
Yeah, yeah.
In a hotspot, traffic will slow less than half its usual pace
and the study also looked at economic costs
in terms of wasted time, loss, fuel, and carbon emissions
over the next decade.
So that kind of describes what they consider to be cost,
I guess, because we have cost on our well-being
as well.
Sure, yeah, it's a, yeah, it's a, it's a umbrella term.
Well, here's where the rubber hits the road, folks,
and the nation's wallet.
If you live near a city and you also drive a car,
you can't do very much to avoid traffic.
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A 2007 study showed that in 28 urban areas across the U.S.,
drivers spend, get this,
an entire work week's worth of time
sitting in traffic each year.
So that means for almost 30 cities in the U.S.,
you're losing an entire week, five days,
nine to five of your life sitting in your car.
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make sure you have a reliable one,
make sure you can listen to podcasts while you're driving.
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The worst example we found was Los Angeles.
In Los Angeles, drivers lose almost two weeks a year,
two traffic.
And this does have serious consequences.
I'm glad you mentioned people's personal well-being
here, Kurt, which is tough to put a price on that.
But we can estimate the cost of traffic
through a couple of different lenses.
In 2005, the estimated cost of traffic to the nation
was more than $78 billion in fuel and wasted time alone.
So that's like we take the average income of someone
for a work week.
And then we say, well, this is the money
that could have been made if they weren't stuck
in their vehicle.
And then we also say, this is the amount of,
this is the price for gallon of fuel.
It's how many cars were delayed,
there's how much the fuel cost.
Add those numbers together and get $78 billion.
It's missing important things.
It doesn't factor in stuff like damage to the environment,
possibly still kind of hard to quantify.
And it doesn't factor in health cost,
whether that is your physical health or your mental health.
I mean, I'm sure there have been a couple of people
who went to a therapist or something
because of their road rage.
What about wear and tear on the roads?
Very good call, yeah.
So Americans bought 2.9 billion extra gallons of gas
because of traffic congestion than 2005.
And the average annual cost to an individual driver
was $710.
And that's just due to the extra time
that you spend on the road because of congestion.
Yeah, and let's go back to Enrex.
Let's look at, let's drill down into a specific example.
Enrex found that the single worst traffic hotspot
in the country, the single worst network overload instance
or bottleneck is near Fredericksburg, Virginia.
It's on Interstate 95 South at Exit 133A.
And technically, I don't know this true,
but technically that means that if you are stuck
in traffic right now and listening to this show,
you have a higher than average likelihood
of being gridlocked there at 95 South Exit 133A.
Anybody who's been through that, write to us.
I mean, write to us when you're not driving.
Let us know if this thing is as much of a bruiser
as it sounds because in Fredericksburg, Virginia,
at that one spot in the entire country,
drivers are losing an estimated $2.3 billion through 2026,
$2.3 billion, one stretch of Interstate 95 South Exit 133A.
$2.3 billion, that's crazy.
And the numbers get higher too, right?
In conclusion, the report said that across all 25 cities
that they studied, traffic hotspots will cost drivers $480 billion
during the next 10 years and lost time,
wasted fuel and carbon emitted.
When that is broaded out across the country
as a whole, the cost of these hotspots is expected to reach.
Oh, Kurt, Kurt, Kurt, can we get a drum roll real quick?
Yes.
Yes, so the cost of these hotspots
is expected to reach $2.2 trillion.
And that's trillion with a T, $2.2 trillion
through 2026.
Is that even real money at that point?
I can't, I mean, I can't.
Are there trillionaires?
Is there someone with a trillion dollars?
Not yet.
Not yet.
And that is a real number, $2.2 trillion.
That's the answer to today's episode.
If you look at the cost of lost time,
wasted fuel, carbon emitted from now to 2026,
it's going to hit $2.2 trillion in expenses.
And of course, that is an incomplete number.
We can't put a genuine hard number
on the quality of time lost to traffic, right?
Because we can say a work week,
we can say a person makes so-and-so per hour or per year
and do the math that way.
But we can't put a price on the time
that drivers could be spending with their family,
their friends, their loved ones.
We can't put a price on the cost of going to a psychiatrist
because of your traffic nightmares.
And of course, I don't know if we can,
but we have not yet put an annual cost
on the court cases for road rage, hopefully we're kidding.
But there's stuff we can't price out.
Right.
And the added risk of driving in congested areas is...
Yeah, we didn't even mention the cost of insurance,
which changes based on where you live.
And a lot of that is due to reports of crime or accidents, right?
So, there ends our story.
Hopefully, the congestion that you were in
while you were listening to today's show
has eased up a bit.
You're getting back up to speed.
You've made it through your local traffic hotspot
and you only paid a bit of that $2.2 trillion in lost time.
And this ends our episode, but not our show.
We want to know your traffic war stories.
What is the worst traffic jam you've ever been in?
Briefly, let's see, I think the worst one that I was ever in
probably was about...
Not too bad actually, it was about four hours.
I get stuck in traffic on an interstate where there was
a major accident and I was really irritated about it
until in the distance, like several miles ahead,
I saw a helicopter taking off and I realized
that whoever was in that accident,
it was getting a life flight to a hospital
and that put things in perspective.
That made me think, you know what?
Being four hours late or being held up like that
is still better than being in a terrible accident.
So everybody stays safe.
I don't know, Kurt, do you have any crazy traffic stories?
That's nothing on that one.
The longest I've ever spent in a traffic jam
and additional to the time that it would have taken to get
there was maybe a couple hours in the DC area.
Oh yeah, that's four hours is pretty intense.
You were driving in DC, man.
Oh, through DC, yeah.
Through DC.
In that I-95, the whole road is a disaster,
especially up through there.
Oh, that's the last thing.
Oh, I have to mention, okay.
I don't know if anybody else does this,
but when I'm driving, I am pretty,
I'll be pretty forgiving or judgmental based on
the county and the state of license plates in our city.
If I see someone making a foolish left hand turn
and their license plate tells me
that they're from out of town, I get it.
You may not know that that became a turn lane,
you may not know there wasn't a turn,
that kind of stuff, because you're unfamiliar.
But if I see somebody with city plates
and they are doing something shistly,
they're driving poorly, then-
They're doing it on purpose.
Very much, I'm back to Mad Max, yeah.
And they shall be judged.
I'm with you on that always, yeah.
So, yes, let us know your war stories
we want to hear from you.
You can find us on Facebook and Instagram
at carstuffhsw and the website is carstuffshow.com.
And check out our Facebook community especially,
because we've got some great long time listeners there.
We've got some expert gear heads,
and we have some fantastic cars amongst our listeners.
Do check it out.
Thanks, everyone, and we'll see you next time.
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About this episode
Traffic congestion is a universal frustration, especially in cities like Atlanta, where even short commutes can stretch for hours. This episode dives into the economic impact of traffic, revealing that Americans lose an entire work week annually to gridlock. The hosts discuss the causes of traffic jams, including network overload and disturbances like accidents and construction. They highlight a study estimating the cost of traffic hotspots at $2.2 trillion over the next decade, emphasizing the hidden costs of lost time and increased fuel consumption. Personal anecdotes and insights from traffic experts add depth to the discussion.
Original notes
There is enough gridlock out there to drive even the coolest car-loving commuter over a cliff, and traffic costs us much more than our minds. Listen to find out just how much modern-day logjams actually cost.