The Texas Transportation Institute recently published its latest urban mobility report, rating the amount of congestion in each of more than 100 urbanized areas. The report also estimates total congestion costs in 439 urbanized areas.
The Antiplanner has taken previous reports with a grain of salt because congestion estimates were based on formulas rather than on actual measurements of traffic delays. This report, for the first time, incorporates information from actual traffic speeds. The authors say they have backtracked this new methodology to the year 2000, but data before then (which go back to 1982) rely on the old methods. There does not appear to be a significant discontinuity between 1999 and 2000, which suggests either that the old methodology wasn’t too bad or the new data don’t play a huge role in the calculations.
