Phoenix has seen the least increase in congestion of any major urban area in America. According to the data set accompanying the Texas Transportation Institute’s recently released 2019 Urban Mobility Report, the average commuter in Phoenix suffered from 80 hours of delay in 2017, up 26 hours from 1982. That compares with an 82-hour growth in delay per commuter in the San Francisco and Washington urban areas and an average 53-hour increase in delay for the nation’s top 50 urban areas.[*]
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Phoenix’s relatively small increase in traffic congestion is largely due to the massive increase in freeways in the region. According to an earlier edition of the urban mobility report, Phoenix had 210 lane-miles of freeways in 1982, growing to 2,015 by 2017. Part of this increase was due to an expansion of the urban area, leading to the addition of freeways that already existed but were previously outside the urban area. But the region has little more than doubled in land area since 1982 while the freeway lane-miles increased by nearly ten times. No other region has seen such a large increase in freeway lane-miles. Continue reading
