The Ten Cities with the Worst Commutes And How Much it Costs You: (No surpise we are number 2!)
Sitting in traffic sucks for a lot of reasons (for the exception of listening to me on your radio) but it's also expensive. Something called the Texas Traffic Institute just released their Urban Mobility Report, and they break down the cost of traffic in 101 cities.
Basically, they looked at how many hours people sat in traffic jams in a given city figured out how many of those commuters were driving cars or trucks and calculated the average cost of wasted gasoline and time.
They found that the average commuter wastes $808 a year sitting in traffic. And it's about 40% more on average in large urban areas, where traffic costs you $1,166 per year in lost gas and time.
When it comes to the cost of 'lost time' people who drive cars waste $16 an hour, and truck drivers waste $106 an hour.
Check out the ten worst cities, and what your yearly commute costs you in lost time and gas:
#1 ) Chicago: $1,738 . . . 70 hours and 52 gallons of gas.
#2.) Washington, D.C.: $1,555 . . . 70 hours and 57 gallons.
#3.) Los Angeles: $1,464 . . . 63 hours and 50 gallons.
#4.) Houston: $1,322 . . . 58 hours and 52 gallons.
#5.) Baltimore: $1,218 . . . 50 hours and 43 gallons.
#6.) San Francisco: $1,112 . . . 49 hours and 39 gallons.
#7.) Boston: $1,112 . . . 48 hours and 36 gallons.
#8.) Dallas - Ft. Worth: $1,077 . . . 48 hours and 38 gallons.
#9.) Denver: $1,057 . . . 47 hours and 38 gallons.
#10.) Seattle: $1,056 . . . 44 hours and 35 gallons.
Trucks obviously waste more gas than cars, so for some cities with equal amounts of traffic jam time like Chicago and D.C. . . . the average cost of the traffic was higher in Chicago, because there were more trucks on the road.
And New York wasn't in the top ten, because the study looked at the whole New York area, not just Manhattan.
If you want to see how your city did, you can check out the interactive map here.
interactive map here.
