![]() “We can’t ignore congestion,” Pollack said. Indeed, using similar peak-vs.-nonpeak metrics, the GPS company TomTom found that Boston doesn’t even rank among the country’s 10 worst.īut Boston-area drivers probably don’t need a hard number to know traffic here is bad - and getting worse, despite billions spent on the Big Dig and other highway improvements. “What people care about is their total commute time.”ĭespite all the technology in modern vehicles, measuring traffic congestion appears to be an imprecise science. “All this report does is say, ‘what is the difference between essentially the speed limit and how fast you’re going?’ ” state Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack said, objecting to Inrix’s ranking. In big metro areas that are more spread out, such as Houston or Phoenix, drivers may spend more time in the car, but not all of it in congestion. Some transportation specialists have argued Inrix’s approach disadvantages densely built cities such as Boston, where some motorists may spend their entire commute in congestion but aren’t traveling very far. Even so, that was again the worst in the country.īut the Inrix report comes with caveats and, indeed, the company has been criticized previously for the methodology it uses to rank metro area congestion - using travel speeds to measure the severity of the gridlock, for example, and not total time spent driving. Inrix did find an ever-so-slight improvement in Boston traffic from 2017, when it took drivers 182 more hours to commute during rush hour. “It doesn’t lend itself well to moving vehicles.” “When you have older street networks like Boston, they clog much faster than in a city that was built around the automobile,” Reed said. A smaller, older, and more compact region such as Boston, he said, simply just wasn’t built to handle a sudden influx of cars. ![]() ![]() Bogota had the most hours lost to peak period congestion: 272 in 2018.Īnalyst Trevor Reed said the Inrix ranking shows how quickly traffic deteriorates during rush hour. On the economic scale, Boston comes in eighth, behind cities in Europe and Latin America, with Moscow topping the list. In ranking cities around the world, Inrix listed cities both by economic impact and hours lost. Those data are also the basis of its annual ranking of 200 metro regions around the world. Inrix collects traffic data from sensors in phones, vehicles, and GPS systems and sells that to trucking fleets, government agencies, and other customers such as billboard operators. ![]()
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