News & Politics

Yes, Washington Has the Worst Traffic Congestion

At least according to a new study.

Yes, traffic really is the worst here. Photograph courtesy of Flickr user Elvert Barnes.

If you ever find yourself sitting in the rush hour crawl and thinking, “This city
has the worst traffic congestion of any in this country,” well, turns out you’re right.
At least according to a new study from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. The
metro Washington area ranks first in a list of ten cities—ahead of even Los Angeles.

This won’t make it any better, especially with gas prices upward of $4 a gallon: The
report says the average DC driver spends 67 hours on delays annually, wasting an estimated
32 gallons of gas.

Looked at another way, that’s 67 hours for applying mascara, drinking coffee, eating
a bagel, reading the newspaper, talking on the phone and to carpool mates, or, given
what we’ve seen (somewhat scarily) one car over, catching up on Zs.