![]() About half of traffic congestion disappeared during the COVID year 2020 versus 2019. Well, from a research perspective is very interesting and that for the first time of study and traffic congestion, both nationwide and in Texas, we saw area-wide, statewide, national declines in traffic congestion. What sort of takeaways do you have from doing both of those studies in a pandemic year? You and your colleagues noted that not only in this Texas analysis, but also in the Urban Mobility Report, which is a nationwide analysis, several months ago. COVID 19 caused a lot of things in life to hit the pause button - roadway traffic included. And then that may ultimately lead toward what we can do about trying to improve those locations.īeing able to analyze those different factors helps you whenever you’re trying to come up with the solutions for those individual road sections. And so we need to have this detail in order to paint a clear picture about why these road sections are where they’re at on the list. Whereas we don’t see as much weekend congestion on some of these commute corridors. And we see, for example, weekend congestion on I-35 in Austin, weekend congestion on the west loop in Houston. As I mentioned earlier, some of these are where they’re at because they have congestion 24-7. And so there’s different reasons for why road sections are where they’re at. For example, truck traffic on I-35 in Austin, the number-two most congested road section for the COVID 2020 year, is number one for truck traffic. The detail is important because while you have two roads, for example, number one, and number two on the list, why they are there might be slightly different. Why is that level of detail so important? You measure hours of delay, wasted fuel, impact of truck traffic. I mentioned in the introduction how you really get into a lot of detail. ![]() Once you get out of those top ones, you get into some of the commuting corridors that don’t have enough traffic on them, 24 hours, seven days a week to make it into that top 10 or 15, but they tend to stay in the top 20 or 30. In contrast, then, it seems that we see a lot more change in the rankings for those road sections that are farther down the list. And so it’s important for us to monitor those locations, to see how they are changing relative to other locations within those metros. Like I-35 through downtown Austin, like the west loop in Houston, those are going to have traffic on them year in and year out because of where they are and the functions they serve. And it’s because of where those locations are in the metro regions of Texas. As you mentioned, Bernie, the worst of the worst location tends to stay at the top of the list. So with that in mind, we need to study and we need to track what is happening on our roadways so that we have a better understanding about where the pressure points are from year to year. And with that means transportation is changing. The population in Texas is continuing to grow. So since there’s so little change, why is it necessary to keep measuring all of this every year? They just seem to trade spots from year to year. We began the Texas 100 Most Congested Road Section work in, uh, 2009.Īnd since that time, at least it appears that from year to year, the rankings of which roadway sections are the worst - those don’t really change very much. ![]() So you’ve been doing this work for about a decade, right? David’s joined us for this episode of Thinking Transportation to help us understand why all of that detail is so important. David Schrank, a senior research scientist at TTI, can tell you how the roadways on your daily commute rank on that statewide list, based on the number of hours of delay every year, along with the financial cost of that delay down to the dollar, and the amount of fuel you’re wasting while you’re stuck in traffic. In Texas, they’ve been taking that examination down to a detailed level, looking at specific sections of freeways and major streets and assigning a rank to every single one, all 1,854 of them. Mobility researchers at TTI have been studying traffic congestion for decades, giving a gridlock rating to hundreds of cities across the United States. I’m Bernie Fette with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. This is Thinking Transportation - conversations about how we get ourselves and the things we need from one place to another.
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