The “unbearable” site visitors seen at instances in Boston locations it fifth for worst commutes within the nation, a brand new examine discovered.
Boston drivers spend a mean of 32.6 minutes on every leg of their commute, with 15.6% caught in gridlock for greater than an hour per journey, in response to analysis performed by Automoblog, utilizing 2021 U.S. Census knowledge.
The Bay State capital was solely outranked by Riverside, Calif.; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; and New York City, which took the highest spot with the most important share of commuters, 22.7%, spending greater than an hour in site visitors per journey.
“Drivers in Boston have it rough, to say the least,” mentioned David Straughan, who commissioned the examine. “According to some, ‘rush hour’ can start as early as 6 a.m. and extend as late as 7 p.m. most days of the week.”
But it’s not simply rush hour that drives town’s congestion downside, in response to Straughan, who mentioned its profitable skilled sports activities groups could make site visitors “unbearable at almost any time,” on account of followers swarming the stadiums.
“Traffic on the Southeast Expressway portion of I-93 regularly grinds to a halt, but drivers heading north of the city towards Cambridge and Somerville via Route 28 consistently face Boston’s worst congestion,” Straughan mentioned.
The examine, which notably used 2021 knowledge, comes weeks after INRIX, a worldwide transportation knowledge and analytics firm, ranked Boston site visitors as second-worst within the nation and fourth-worst on the earth in 2022.
According to INRIX, Boston is ranked behind London, Chicago and Paris, however forward of New York City with the best “traffic delay times.”
The typical Boston driver misplaced 134 hours to congestion, up 56 hours from 2021 when it was ranked fourth within the U.S. and 18th on the earth, INRIX discovered.
Boston Chief of Streets Jascha Franklin-Hodge mentioned town is constant to see adjustments in site visitors patterns following the pandemic.
Mondays and Fridays usually are not a lot lighter, when it comes to congestion, than what would have been seen on a typical weekday pre-pandemic, and town is seeing a return to very heavy site visitors mid-week, Franklin-Hodge mentioned.
“We’ve had a few days over the last couple of weeks where the interstates coming through Boston have jammed up in the evening rush hour to a degree that is then spilled over onto city streets, causing really tremendous congestion in the city,” he mentioned.
Franklin-Hodge mentioned there might have been contributing components over that point interval, such because the climate and a tractor-trailer crash on I-93 that pushed a fence onto the Red Line tracks and brought about main congestion.
But, he mentioned, what’s change into abundantly clear is that the area’s freeway community is at capability at peak touring instances, and that congestion has profound implications for a driver’s means to achieve their vacation spot.
“Fundamentally, our view on this is that we can’t build our way out of traffic congestion,” Franklin-Hodge mentioned. “We’re in a land-constrained space. We can’t add highway lanes or add new highways, and the city streets we have cannot grow or get bigger. The only thing we can do is give people good alternatives.”
To that finish, he mentioned town is concentrated on investing its assets in public transit and various modes of transportation, by including bike lanes, bettering pedestrian security, and offering precedence area for buses.
“All of these are tools in the toolkit, but there’s no solution for our region to grow or even to sustain its current level of activity without having an increased use of transit and bikes and walking,” Franklin-Hodge mentioned.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”