A new report from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute about commuters’ traffic woes is a doozy. The big takeaway: Drivers are wasting more time than ever “stopping and going in an ocean of brake lights” (to quote one news account). Since the Institute’s first Urban Mobility Report was issued in 1982, the number of hours per commuter lost to traffic delay has nearly tripled, climbing to 54 hours a year. The nationwide cost of gridlock has grown more than tenfold, to $166 billion a year.
This series of reports has become sort of infamous in transportation circles: It’s been the target of scathing criticism for focusing solely on driving and traffic to the exclusion of public transit, walking, biking, sprawl, pollution, injuries, deaths, or carbon emissions.
But the report’s biggest deficiency is simpler: Commuters are not actually spending all that much more time getting to work.
Take Houston, for example, which according to the Urban Mobility Report has seen the largest increase in congestion delays over the last decade: 75 hours wasted in 2017, up 42 percent from a decade earlier.
Compare that growth with data from the U.S. Census Bureau showing how long it takes Houston drivers to get to work. The average auto commute was 30.3 minutes in the Houston area in 2017, up just 1.6 minutes from a decade earlier—a barely perceptible 6 percent i ..
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