As it has for nearly two decades, the Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Study welcomed summer with unsurprising findings: Traffic congestion is growing everywhere and costs Americans a lot of money. The UMS, known for telling just how long the average person is stuck in traffic, tracks 75 U.S. cities, and Austin is mediocre at best. Our “travel time index” went up for the ninth year in a row; congestion wastes 61 hours and 104 gallons of gas per person per year, and costs us about $400 million annually. Though Austin ranks 47th in population on the UMS list, we’re well within the top 20 on all those negative measures, and even worse for cities our size. The TTI, based at Texas A&M, calls for more and better roads and transit, better demand management, and more attention to land use.
This article appears in June 28 • 2002.