Duffy Inquires on Worst Bottlenecks

What a coincidence that shortly after we wrote about one of the worst bottlenecks in the nation for trucks getting additional commercial vehicle only lanes, the Secretary of Transportation wants to collect some data himself.

Details

The news comes out of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and its new “Freedom to Drive” initiative. The announcement of this initiative includes some interesting key statistics, not only for commercial drivers but everyone on the road:

• Over 4 million miles of public roads deliver 92 percent of commute trips and carry 72 percent of all freight.
• The United States includes 10 of the 25 most congested cities in the world.
• The average urban auto commuter lost 63 hours stuck in traffic in 2024, costing $1,480 per commuter.
• This represents $269 billion in lost productivity and fuel costs.
• Vehicle travel has increased by 10 percent, and delays have increased by 22 percent since 2014.
• Over the next 25 years, vehicle travel will grow another 16 percent.
• Freight shipments by truck are expected to increase by nearly 50 percent over the next 25 years.

To that end, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has released a letter to the governors of the fifty states, asking them to list their state’s worst five bottlenecks. Assuming half of them participate, that would give the Department of Transportation 125 different areas to look into to reduce traffic.

“This includes building new roadway capacity or applying operational strategies and technologies to maximize existing roadway capacity. You may also need to recover roadway capacity from other purposes to support driving,” Duffy said in a statement.

Conclusion

In our opinion, one easy way that the Department of Transportation could save time and gather data more effectively is to consult the American Transportation Research Institute’s data on the worst bottlenecks, though that would only be for commercial vehicles rather than drivers as a whole. Ultimately, reducing the amount of congestion for one will have reverberating effects on the other, especially in areas where the two types of travel share the same road.

Whatever the case, we wish Sean Duffy and the Department of Transportation luck in whatever it can to do to fight against one of the most reviled phenomena plaguing all Americans: traffic.

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