Photo by Polar Pic Pool
Tough luck for travelers looking for an alternative to Metro. D.C. was just seven hours short of having the worst traffic in the country last year, according to a new study. INRIX, a company that researches urban mobility, released its 2015 Traffic Scorecard today, ranking the District as number two among the most gridlocked cities. The average D.C. driver spent 75 hours nestled between other cars in 2015, the report says.
Los Angeles was crowned the most traffic congested city, as vehicles moved at a snail’s pace for about 81 hours during the course of the year. San Francisco, Houston, New York, and Seattle also topped the list. Commuters in these six cities spent a total of 8 billion hours stuck in traffic last year, the report says.
To gather the results, INRIX analyzed traffic speed data on more than one million miles of roadways and highway performance data from the Federal Highway Administration. In D.C., this translated to tracking interstates from I-270 and I-50 to I-66 and the George Washington Memorial Parkway.
The most delays in the region occurred on weekday mornings between 7-8 a.m. and evenings between 3-5 p.m. While the maximum speed limit on D.C. highways is 55 mph, drivers during these times paced between 18 -32 mph.
The study attributes a portion of traffic issues to economic improvement. As new infrastructure emerges and more people get to work, it says, streets become more congested. Last year, D.C.’s Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development launched a database of city-managed projects so residents can keep up with the city’s development boom. In addition, the region’s unemployment rate was 4.8 last December compared to 5.4 in December 2014, according to statistical area data from the U.S. Bureau of Statistics.
