Study says Richmond traffic congestion not getting worse

The Richmond area’s traffic congestion is holding steady, with the average driver wasting about 20 hours per year, according to a national traffic study released today.

The report by the Texas Transportation Institute, published annually since 1982, shows the 20-hour figure applied to travelers in peak drive times in the Richmond area in 2007, the most recent year of the study. That represented the fourth consecutive year the figure stood at 20 hours.

The annual delay figure was as low as six hours in 1982, hit 10 in 1986 and peaked at 23 in 1996. After falling to 16 hours in 2000, it crept back up to 20 in 2004 before leveling off at that number.

Those numbers pale in comparison to the Washington metro area’s traffic, which ranked second only to Los Angeles in congestion, with the average driver wasting about 62 hours a year in 2007.

“Some of that is related to the good general economy in Washington, with the expansion of government and government services,“ said Tim Lomax, a research engineer for the institute and the study’s co-author.

The Washington metro area has undertaken some expensive road projects. They include the Springfield interchange,  Woodrow Wilson Bridge, the HOT lanes on the Capital Beltway in Virginia, the planned widening of Interstate 66 in Virginia and the Intercounty Connector being built in Maryland.

Experts agree that no one approach — building more roads or commuter rail lines — will reverse the traffic trend.

“The best solutions are going to be those in which actions by transportation agencies are complemented by businesses, manufacturers and commuters,“ Lomax said. “The problem is far too big for transportation agencies alone to address it adequately.“

Washington-area drivers wasted three more hours in the car compared with the previous year, the study discovered.

Adding in the price of gas and lost productivity, Lomax’s study concludes that sitting in traffic cost the Washington area almost $2.8 billion in 2007. Ninety million gallons of gas and 133 million hours were wasted.

In the Richmond area, sitting in traffic cost $202 million in 2007. There were 6.6 million gallons of gas and 10.2 million hours wasted.

Elsewhere nationally, Houston, Las Vegas, Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, N.C., had worse or equally bad traffic compared with the previous year, victims of a fast-growing population that outpaced roadway capacity.

In Montclair, Va., the 30-mile commute to Washington, D.C., has always been so bad that Ray McInerney, 29, and three co-workers decided years ago to car pool. He has no major complaints about the ride to their jobs at the Interior Department — so long as they leave by 6 a.m. and head home at 4 p.m., taking advantage of high-occupancy vehicle lanes along I-95.

Shuttling around the region for his 12-year-old son’s baseball practice and tournaments is a different story, but McInerney says he endures the traffic along with everyone else because cutting back on trips is not an option.

“It’s definitely something that came to mind when gas prices came close to four dollars,” he said. “But we would have to have serious cutbacks for him not to be able to play.”

The Texas Transportation Institute analyzed state and Federal Highway Administration data for 439 urban areas. It estimated:

—The overall cost of U.S. traffic congestion in 2007 reached $87.2 billion, more than $750 for every traveler.

—The amount of wasted time in traffic totaled 4.2 billion hours, nearly an entire work week for every traveler.

—After Los Angeles and Washington, the most congested metro areas were Atlanta, Houston, San Francisco, Dallas-Forth Worth, San Jose, Calif., and Orlando, Fla.

—The least congested metros were Lancaster-Palmdale, Calif., and Wichita, Kan., where drivers were delayed an average of six hours a year.

The report urged state and federal governments to act now to develop highways or mass transit, since these programs can take 10 to 15 years to complete. It said short-term fixes such as rapidly removing crashed vehicles and timing traffic signals also would help, while employers can offer flexible work hours and telecommuting to reduce travel during traditional rush hours.

The findings come as the Obama administration has signaled that it wants to keep transportation funding at current levels for 18 months, rather than move forward on a proposed six-year, $500 billion bill that would increase highway aid 40 percent and double transit funding. There are questions about how to pay for that.

Robert E. Lang, co-director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, said while the recession is altering how many people work, live and travel, that won’t be enough to hold back traffic congestion. With the U.S. growing by three million people each year, the nation’s aging infrastructure won’t be able to keep up without broad upgrades — especially once the economy picks up again.

“It’s the lull before the coming storm,” he said.