Transportation
Traffic’s Mind-Boggling Economic Toll
The largest study of its kind ever conducted reveals just how how costly the scourge of traffic is in the world’s greatest cities.
In the U.S. alone, congestion cost $305 billion last year, an increase of $10 billion from 2016. That’s the big, bad takeaway from the largest-ever study of global vehicular traffic by the transportation consulting firm INRIX. Armed with five terabytes of data on 1,360 cities in 38 countries, the study provides a strong empirical sense of how much traffic congestion costs individual cities and drivers.
Not surprisingly, traffic takes the biggest economic toll on the largest, most economically vibrant cities.