Weekend Reads | Seattle's Traffic Scorecard

by Kevin Schofield

This weekend's read is the "INRIX 2023 Global Traffic Scorecard." INRIX is a Seattle-area company, a spinoff of Microsoft, that collects and analyzes traffic data and uses it to build predictive models that help cities — and commuters — manage local traffic. The company's annual "scorecard" ranks urban areas according to their "congestion impact," the average number of hours lost by commuters to traffic congestion weighted by the size of the city.

Let's cut to the chase: The Seattle area ranks 10th worst for urban areas in the United States. On average, commuters lost 58 hours to traffic congestion in 2023, up from 46 hours in 2022. That cost about $1,010 per driver, or collectively $1.6 billion.

The top 10 are an unsurprising list, including New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami. The top 25 list has a couple of less-familiar names: Stamford, Connecticut (a suburb of New York City), and King of Prussia, Pennsylvania (just outside of Philadelphia).

This is surprising, however: Of the top 25 areas, seven have worse traffic impact now than in 2019, before COVID-19 and the shift to work-from-home. New York City is 11% worse; Chicago and Miami are each 18% worse. Some good news: Seattle is 11% better than in 2019. Across the United States, transit ridership is down 28% compared with pre-COVID, though it bounced back 15% between 2022 and 2023. Working from home increased from 9 million people in 2019 to 27.6 million in 2021, though it slipped back down a bit to 24.4 million in 2022.

The report also lists the 25 busiest traffic corridors in the United States. Four are in Los Angeles, and four are in Stamford. Six are in Florida, including three in Miami, and Orlando has the dubious honor of the most congested corridor in the country. None of the top 25 was in Washington State.

Traffic congestion is far from only a U.S. phenomenon. The report also includes a list of the top 25 congested European cities: Six were in the United Kingdom, including London at No. 1, and three were in Poland. London's average for lost hours per year was 99, which would have put it at No. 2 on the U.S. list, behind New York City. Seattle, however, wouldn't have even cracked the top 20 on the European list.

The report includes an interesting insight: Compared with 2019, early morning trips have declined significantly in the U.S. and midday trips have increased. This is probably related to more people working from home. INRIX calls strong midday travel the "new normal."

Also interesting: The average U.S. urban commute is about 6.5 miles. The report includes a chart of commute distances, which forms an almost-perfect "normal curve" distribution. That suggests that commute distance, i.e., how far people live away from work, is a "natural phenomenon," largely personal preference and not affected much by artificial barriers — for example, where housing is available or how good the transportation infrastructure is as one moves farther away from downtown.

From the "INRIX 2023 Global Traffic Scorecard."

Clearly, things are complicated out there. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are still with us. Working from home is receding but still significant; on the other hand, it seems that many of the people who switched from riding the bus to driving themselves during the pandemic are only slowly switching back to mass transit. But Seattle, as with other things, appears to be an outlier: Our traffic is lousy, but it's better than pre-COVID.

One final observation: Of the top five most-congested U.S. cities, three of them (New York City, Chicago, and Boston) are known for their extensive mass transit systems. Building out mass transit seems to be necessary, but not sufficient, for controlling traffic congestion.

INRIX 2023 Global Traffic Scorecard

Featured image via Songquan Deng/Shutterstock.com.