ATRI Releases Busiest Bottlenecks of 2023

The American Research Transportation Institute (ATRI) releases some interesting data tidbits that the average trucker can use to better plan his or her routes. The simplest answer? Stay away from Houston!

Methodology

The ATRI lists its methodology of how it got its numbers. Here is the gist of it:

1. Assume the optimal speed for a truck at each bottleneck is 55 MPH.
2. Find the truck average speed for a given hour and then multiply it by the number of trucks that were part of that hour block to find the “congestion value”. By this metric, one truck traveling 1 MPH is less of an indicator of congestion than 60 trucks moving 54 MPH.
3. Add the congestion values of all twenty-four hours for the day. With 307 different locations surveyed, there are over 7,350 values to analyze. The highest number wins.

If you want to read the details for each bottleneck, you can read them at the ATRI’s webpage. Here are some highlights:

• Houston, Texas had nine bottlenecks in the top 100, the most in any city.
• Texas itself has the most congested bottlenecks on the state level at thirteen.
• The single most congested bottleneck for the fifth year in a row is the intersection of I-95 and SR 4 in Fort Lee, New Jersey, at the George Washington Bridge.
• The lowest average speed of the top 100 is Chicago, IL: I-290 at I-90/I-94, also known as the Jane Byrne interchange. It has an average of 23.5 miles per hour, which is approximately the speed of a Tour de France cyclist.
• Los Angeles, CA: I-710 at I-105 has the largest decrease, with speeds dropping by almost a third from the year prior.

Conclusion

The data is overall very good, but there is a slight problem with the methodology assuming that all roads have a speed limit of 55 MPH. Some roads like the I-80 in Utah have speed limits of 80 MPH, and as such certain states have no entries on the list due to negative congestion.

The data here are very interesting, though, and can be used to better chart a course when traveling across multiple states.

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