Dallas-area traffic congestion and its impacts on commuters actually eased a bit last year compared to problems in other major metropolitan areas, according to a national study released this morning by the Texas Transportation Institute.
The area continued to grow but the traffic got no worse overall, thanks in part to lingering highunemployment but also the cumulative result of an unusually high level of road construction here.
The TTI annual mobility report measures the impact of traffic across a range of factors, including the cost of congestion, measured in the value of our lost time and wasted fuel, and what it calls the travel time index, a measure of how much longer a trip takes during rush hour than it would if traffic was moving freely.
The report, which is based on 2010 data, shows that on average a rush-hour commuter in North Texas lost 45 hours stuck in traffic that year and wasted 22 gallons of gas. That's the amount of time and fuel that would have been saved if traffic had not been moving freely.
Like last year, both of those numbers are down slightly from a high in 2006, a result the researchers say is linked to the lingering weak economy and high unemployment. When the economy was booming here, traffic was worse.
The two measures improved slightly from 2009 -- when drivers lost 23 gallons and gas and 46 hours, respectively -- and helped Dallas Fort Worth improve in the ranks to 7th place (down from 5th) and 10th place (instead of 9th last year) nationally.
The study also calculates the dollar cost of the lost fuel and wasted time, taking into account the cost of gas here and the area's wages. The researchers say each commuter here loses, on average, $924 a year to bad traffic. That's 11th worst in the country, an improvement from last year when we ranked 10th and lost $927 per commuter.
The report measures traffic congestion in several ways, and the researchers say no single measure is better than others.
In other measures, Dallas appeared to essentially to lose ground or remain the same. In 2010, the travel time index worsened from 1.22 to 1.23, a tiny change that means that a trip would take 10 minutes in free-flowing conditions, would take 12.3 minutes during rush-hour traffic, instead of 12.2 minutes last year. The change was too slight to affect the area's ranking, which remained 16th worst among America's largest urban areas.
We ranked 11th nationally as recently as 2007.
The total number of hours lost by drivers here in the aggregate remained the 5th highest total in the country -- but that's a figure that sounds worse than it is, considering the DFW area is the 6th largest and has a stronger economy than many areas.
The weak economy isn't the only change in North Texas that might help explain why we have slightly more tolerable traffic than other large cities. We added 195 lane miles of freeways and nearly 500 lane miles of arterial streets since 2006.
Houston, whose urban-area population is 11th largest in the nation, ranks worse in all the congestion measures compared to DFW. It has added just 159 lane miles of freeways since 2006 and just 207 lane miles of arterial streets. The Atlanta area, which is the 8th largest metro area, ranks similarly to Dallas in many of the rankings. But that area has added just 20 lane miles of freeways since 2006, and about 145 miles of arterial roads.
The report also shows that ridership on transit continues to play a small role in easing congestion for the region. If there was no public transit in North Texas, the amount of additional time commuters would lose would be 2 hours per year.
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