Worst than NYC, Chicago and Houston?
Hey Seattle frequently gets ranked 6th on these studies. Having said that, LA as the perennial number 1 tends to be way above the next city on the list.
As for Austin, I have been hearing for the past few years that traffic is very bad that city. There is a price to be paid for unbridled growth.
I see Atlanta didn't make the list.. You know with a lot of these studies is manipulated data. They are all going to be real bad during any rush hour with bad weather. At least in LA or SF you don't have that problem much at all<g>
From the article:
"I don't think there's a single commuter in Austin who needs an institute to tell them there's a traffic problem here," said Mark Nathan , Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell's chief of staff. "And whether we're 15th, 12th, 10th or third, we're in the midst of a very serious traffic crisis."
So, if the report shows Austin's traffic slightly improving, how did its ranking get worse?
Simply put, the data used and the formulas applied to that data changed since the last report, said Tim Lomax , senior researcher with the transportation institute. He has been an author of the report since its inception 29 years ago.
In the past, the report was based only on daily traffic counts taken on highways and major streets in cities around the country. The authors would massage the data using a complicated set of assumptions about how those traffic counts and each city's road network would react to those volumes of vehicles.
This year, for the first time, the transportation institute had actual traffic speed data, calculated from GPS devices in government and company vehicle fleets as well as some iPhones whose users allowed that information to be collected. That information caused the A&M researchers to rejigger some of their formulas.
The result was that Austin's travel time index essentially idled, while those of huge cities tended to fall precipitously. Austin shot up the list. |
