Drive through Chicago, St. Louis or any other major urban area during a weekday morning and evening and you can see first-hand what increased road congestion looks like. It’s a real problem and now the US Department of Transportation says it is costing US businesses real money.
How much money? According to the National Freight Strategic Plan that was released earlier this month, road congestion is costing the trucking industry an estimated $27 billion in lost time and extra fuel costs.
Effects Felt Through the Supply Chain
Those extra costs eventually make their way down the supply chain to consumers. Shipping delays caused by congested highways add billions in costs to consumers that purchase items that are stuck in traffic.
According to the Transportation Department report, the cost of congestion per year — which includes both trucking and passenger cars that are stuck on highways that resemble parking lots during peak periods — is an estimated $1 trillion. To put that into perspective, that’s about seven cents out of every $1 spent in the US each year.
Bad News/Bad News
In 2011, about 10% of all of the nation’s 161,000 miles of highways — which includes the 47,000-mile Interstate Highway System — were regularly affected by traffic delays. And that figure is expected to jump to 34% by 2040 if no improvements are made, according to the report.
At any given moment, about 13,500 miles of highways are essentially always operating below the posted speed limits. And another 8,700 of the nation’s highways are experiencing stop-and-go conditions.
Problems Identified
The report identified six major trends that negatively impact the nation’s ability to move products efficiently over its highways. These include continual growth in freight tonnage year after year, underinvestment in the freight system, challenges in planning and implementing freight projects, continued need to address safety concerns, increased global competition, and a reluctance to deploy new technologies.
Offering Solutions to Improve
The Transportation Department report offered some recommendations to cut down on the country’s transportation congestion problem:
- Implement new and better transit options
- Reduce congestion to improve performance of the freight transportation system
- Improve the safety, security and resiliency of the nation’s transportation system
- Identify major trade gateways and multimodal national freight networks and corridors
- Mitigate the impact of freight projects and movements on communities
- Create greater intermodal connectivity to reduce the number of semi-trucks on the roads
- Deploy more information technology solutions to increase efficiencies and reduce redundancies
“Our freight transportation network is an ever-changing system of systems,” the report stated in its Executive Summary. “While we wait for Congress to act on multi-year funding, US DOT, and other Federal agencies are working with State and local partners to apply innovative finance strategies, encourage public-private partnerships, and use existing grant programs to support freight movement.”