A new study published by the American Transportation Research Institute has estimated that traffic congestion costs the trucking industry just shy of $50 Billion per year.
As part of an on-going effort to study traffic and the most effective ways to combat it, the ATRI determined how much time drivers spent in traffic, how much it delayed them, and from there extrapolated how much money the trucking industry lost due to those delays. The data collected from 2014 will serve as a benchmark for future data collection and will be used to determine the success or failure of future anti-traffic programs.
Because $50 billion can be a hard number to wrap one’s head around, the ATRI broke that figure down a bit. According to their research, traffic costs an average of $26,625 per 150,000 miles a truck drives.
Put another way, the ATRI says 738 million hours were wasted because of traffic. That’s equivalent to 264,500 truck drivers just sitting around twiddling their thumbs for an entire year.
The per-mile cost of traffic varies from state to state. Smaller states with large cities had the highest cost-per-mile in large part because traffic tends to increase around large urban centers. In the District of Columbia for example, the cost of traffic per mile of roadway was equal to $1,045,978. The next closest contender was New Jersey with $526,323, followed by $323,713 in Delaware. Unsurprisingly, the Northeastern states all have some of the highest cost-per-mile traffic impact.
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