How Traffic Congestion Affects Economic Growth

Our relationship to traffic is pretty simple: We hate it. We also loathe its awful-sounding synonyms, congestion and gridlock.

"Without failure, people find it a tremendous inconvenience," says Matthias Sweet, a researcher at the McMaster Institute for Transportation and Logistics at McMaster University. "I’ve never talked to anybody over a dinner table conversation, or making it late to a meeting, saying 'boy, I’m glad I got stuck in traffic.'"