America's 75 Worst Commutes

They are the highways to hell in the country’s most gridlocked cities. The Daily Beast crunches the numbers to determine your ultimate morning nightmares. How did your commute rank?

Bumper-to-bumper traffic is America’s collective nightmare, and like the movie Groundhog Day it repeats on a daily basis.

Congestion consumes billions of gallons of fuel, wastes hundreds of billions of dollars in productivity and causes billions of stress headaches. Yet over 100 million automobile commuters each day feel like they have little option. “We put so much of our national wealth and our identity into the whole motoring thing,” says James Howard Kunstler, author of Geography of Nowhere, “that we can’t imagine doing something different.”

Anthony Downs, author of Stuck in Traffic has identified four reasons for America’s congestion problem, also applicable to most European and Asian economies: first, most of us work during the same hours of the day; second, the country’s economic success has allowed households to buy multiple cars; third, there are more people now than when most roadways were conceived; fourth, more cars means more accidents which means more delays.

In other words, this problem isn’t going anywhere. So the Daily Beast set out to figure out the worst of the worst. The true Highways to Hell. It was a two-step process, done with data from traffic-tracking firm INRIX, which culls information nationwide from more than 1.5 million GPS units, mostly in freight trucks.

Our first step was ranking the metropolitan areas with the worst rush-hour congestion. The order is based on the peak hour Travel Time Index (TTI) for the metropolitan area each highway is in. TTI is a measure of how much longer it takes to complete a road journey during peak congestion hours compared to free-flow hours. (Peak hours are defined as 6 a.m. to 10a.m., and 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.) Speeds during non-peak hours are used by INRIX to establish this free-flow baseline.

After determining the 75 worst metro areas, we then found the worst highway in each, defined as the most hours of bottleneck congestion, as reported by INRIX. The rankings then provide a still deeper look—at the most congested bottleneck segment for the worst highway in each area.

#32, I-15, Las Vegas
Weekly hours of bottleneck congestion: 119
Worst bottleneck: Southbound, Lake Mead Blvd/Exit 45
Length of worst bottleneck: 1.64 mi
Weekly hours of congestion on worst bottleneck: 21
Speed of worst bottleneck when congested: 25 mph

Commuter Buzz: "You have express lanes ending there, traffic merging in, traffic trying to get off and the Spaghetti Bowl backing up," says Trooper Alan Davidson about the I-15/Sahara Avenue intersection. "Some people aren't paying attention and have to take evasive action to slow down or make a quick lane change so they don't rear-end somebody."

#22, I-75, Atlanta
Weekly hours of bottleneck congestion: 250
Worst bottleneck: Southbound, US 41/Northside Dr/Exit 252
Length of worst bottleneck: .8 mi
Weekly hours of congestion on worst bottleneck: 23
Speed of worst bottleneck when congested: 23 mph

Commuter Buzz: “I wish they would make a ‘Grand Theft Auto: Atlanta’ so I could blow up the video game version of Interstate 75. It would be good therapy,” a commenter wrote on the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s online rant forum The Vent last November.

#12, Loop 610, surrounds Houston
Weekly hours of bottleneck congestion: 189
Worst bottleneck: Southbound, Farm-to-Market Rd 1093/Westheimer Rd/Exit 8
Length of worst bottleneck: .16 mi
Weekly hours of congestion on worst bottleneck: 34
Speed of worst bottleneck when congested: 21.9 mph

#9, Kennedy Expressway, Chicago
Weekly hours of bottleneck congestion: 712
Worst bottleneck: Westbound, I 90/I 94/Edens Expressway
Length of worst bottleneck: .2 mi
Weekly hours of congestion on worst bottleneck: 64
Speed of worst bottleneck when congested: 17.2 mph

The expert opinion: “There’s no such thing as rush hour. It’s rush period, rush day,” says Roz Varon, traffic anchor for ABC 7 News This Morning. “With the Kennedy, that thing will stay congested until 10 or 11 a.m. and start backing up again at 1 p.m.”

#4, I-35, Austin
Weekly hours of bottleneck congestion: 460
Worst bottleneck: Northbound, Riverside Dr
Length of worst bottleneck: .92 mi
Weekly hours of congestion on worst bottleneck: 47
Speed of worst bottleneck when congested: 16.2 mph

The expert opinion: “It’s the most traveled stretch of roadway of Austin and in the state,” says Joe Taylor, traffic reporter for News 8 Austin. “It’s quirky. It was designed for a small town, and we’ve grown into a very large city.”

See the entire list here..