ATRI: Traffic congestion costs trucking industry $74.5 billion
Posted October 23, 2018
Traffic congestion on the United States highway system added nearly $74.5 billion in operational costs to the trucking industry in 2016, according to research from the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI).
The rise in costs represents a 0.5 percent increase from 2015, said ATRI, which uses a variety of data sources to calculate the delay values. The study determined that delays on the highways cost motor carriers nearly 1.2 billion hours in lost productivity, the equivalent of 425,533 commercial truck drivers sitting idle for a working year.
Data revealed that congestion costs are increasingly concentrated on a relatively small portion of the highway system. ATRI said that 86.7 percent of the total nationwide congestion costs occurred on 17.2 percent of the segment miles. Metropolitan areas are responsible for more than 91 percent of the total congestion costs, the study said.
ATRI’s analysis documented states, metropolitan areas and counties that were most impacted by the cost increases. The top 10 states experienced costs of more than $2.4 billion each, led by Texas and Florida with more than $5.5 billion each. The top 10 states combined to account for 51.8 percent of the congestion costs nationwide.
A copy of this report is available on ATRI's website.
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