Skip to main content

Fifth annual Inrix traffic scorecard released

Inrix, a leading international provider of traffic information and intelligent driver services, has released its fifth Annual Inrix Traffic Scorecard revealing a startling 30 per cent drop in traffic congestion in the US in 2011. In the report, which also scores Europe, 70 of America’s top 100 most populated cities showed decreases in traffic congestion last year. The report concludes these results are indicative of a ‘stop-’n’-go economy’ where lack of employment combined with high fuel prices is keeping A
May 23, 2012 Read time: 2 mins
RSS163 Inrix, a leading international provider of traffic information and intelligent driver services, has released its fifth Annual Inrix Traffic Scorecard revealing a startling 30 per cent drop in traffic congestion in the US in 2011.

In the report, which also scores Europe, 70 of America’s top 100 most populated cities showed decreases in traffic congestion last year. The report concludes these results are indicative of a ‘stop-’n’-go economy’ where lack of employment combined with high fuel prices is keeping Americans off the roads.

“The declines in traffic congestion across the US and Europe are indicative of stalled economies worldwide,” said Bryan Mistele, Inrix president and CEO. “In America, the economic recovery on Wall Street has not arrived on Main Street. Americans are driving less and spending less fuelled by gas prices and a largely jobless recovery.”

The drop in US traffic congestion in 2011 follows two years of modest increases in 2009 (1%) and 2010 (10%). The last time America experienced a similar decline was 2008, when traffic congestion plummeted 34 per cent. When analysed in correlation with 2011 statistics from the FHWA, US Departments of Energy and Bureau of Labor Statistics, the scorecard provides as much insight into traffic as it does the economy.

Available for free as a public service from Inrix, the company claims its traffic scorecard is the definitive source on traffic congestion in the US and Europe. The report is the first of its kind to rank and provide detailed information on the 100 most congested US metropolitan areas and the 100 worst traffic corridors nationwide. In creating the Scorecard, Inrix analyses information for more than 300,000 miles of roads in the US and 250,000 km in Europe during every hour of the day to generate the most comprehensive and timely congestion analyses available.

The full report is available here.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Making the case for ALPR in enforcement
    February 2, 2012
    Federal Signal's Brian Shockley uses examples from around the world to make the case for the greater use of automatic license plate recognition technology in the US. It is time, he says, to consider the possibilities of a national network and the use of average speed enforcement
  • Hyundai beats pending government mandate with throttle override
    May 3, 2012
    Hyundai in the US has announced that it is fitting brake pedal electronic throttle override capability on all models well before government mandates come into effect. The US government mandate for brake pedal throttle override capability, a component of FMVSS 124 (Accelerator Control Systems), has been under consideration by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). However, its final approval and subsequent timing have yet to be determined. Hyundai says its development teams have been les
  • EVs: Time for a rethink
    December 14, 2021
    Given a growing body of evidence that EVs are not the clean, green machines they are made out to be, Andrew Bunn suggests they can only be part of the puzzle – not the answer to environmental problems
  • Road space utilisation improves travel times, reduces costs
    February 1, 2012
    For major road works schemes, necessary lane closures are timed to minimise congestion, most frequently at night and on weekends when traffic is at its lightest. As a result, rigid timetables are used in planning, programming and implementing work. In the UK, to calculate the expected traffic demand through roads works, historic profiles from the loop-based MIDAS (Motorway Incident Detection Automatic Signalling) system were used. These provided a valuable indicator of anticipated traffic behaviour but were