David A. Kolman, editor, Fleet Maintenance

It is no fun being stuck in traffic, plus it is costly

Aug. 4, 2014
The impact of congestion on trucking.

Congestion on the nation’s Interstate highways added more $9.2 billion in operational costs to the trucking industry last year. That is according to research conducted by American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI).

ATRI (www.atri-online.org) – the trucking industry’s not-for-profit research institute – utilized motor carrier financial data, along with billions of anonymous truck GPS data points, to calculate congestion delays and costs.

Delay totaled more than 141 million hours of lost productivity. That, says ATRI, equates to more than 51,000 truck drivers sitting idle for a working year.

ATRI’s analysis also established the states, metropolitan areas and counties with the highest congestion costs.

Top of the list

California led the nation with more $1.7 billion in costs. Texas followed with more than $1.0 billion. 

The Los Angeles metropolitan area saw the highest cost at nearly $1.1 billion and New York City was close behind at $984 million. 

Congestion tended to be most severe in urban areas, with 89 percent of the congestion costs concentrated on only 12 percent of the Interstate mileage, ATRI research found. 

This concentration of congestion has been well-documented in previous work by ATRI which identified the worst truck bottlenecks in the U.S. Of the 100 worst bottlenecks in ATRI’s 2013 bottleneck analysis, 98 were identified as having “severe” congestion in this cost of congestion analysis.

The analysis also demonstrates the average impact of congestion costs on a per-truck basis. For example, a truck driven for 12,000 miles in 2013 saw an average congestion cost of $408, while a truck driven for 150,000 miles had an average cost of $5,094.

A copy of the complete study results is available on ATRI’s website.

About the Author

David A. Kolman | Contributor - Fleet Maintenance

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