Terrible traffic? Blame the improving economy.

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last updated 27 August 2015

One upside to economic downturns is that traffic congestion falls off: With less economic activity, people do less driving to work, to the store, and to everywhere else. The flip-side is that when economies recover — as America is doing now, however modestly — traffic makes a comeback. And in this case, to multi-decade highs, according to a new study by Texas A&M University and the data analysis firm Inrix:

[The study] found traffic congestion was worse in 2014 than in any year since at least 1982. American commuters spent 42 hours each on average in traffic last year and wasted a total of 3.1 billion gallons of fuel, costing the economy $160 billion. [The Wall Street Journal]

The recent drop in oil prices didn't show up in the study, because the effects of fuel prices take awhile to filter into congestion data. Furthermore, David Ellis, a research scientist at Texas A&M, said that a lot of commuting — to work, taking kids to school, etc — is for fixed needs that stay constant regardless of the price of fuel. There's also a well-researched tendency in which more highway construction leads to more traffic congestion, not less.

The takeaway may be that neither more roads nor higher gas prices will solve traffic congestion. And since we certainly don't want perpetual recessions doing it, the only alternative is probably fundamentally changing the physical infrastructure by which Americans get around.