America Waits Through Record Congestion

Americans spent a total of 3.5 billion hours waiting in traffic during 2002—about 46 hours per peak traveler—according to the 2004 Urban Mobility Report, published by the Texas Transportation Institute. “Congestion has grown everywhere, in areas of all sizes,” according to the report. Collectively, we wasted 5.7 billion gallons (216 billion liters) of fuel. Translated into dollars, that time and fuel represents a whopping $63.2 billion. The full report, which includes detailed statistics for 85 U.S. cities, along with the effects of various solutions, can be downloaded from mobility.tamu.edu.