Congestion on U.S. Interstate highways added over $9.2 billion in operational costs to the trucking industry in 2013, according to research released by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI).
ATRI reportedly used motor carrier financial data with billions of truck GPS data points to calculate congestion delays and costs on each mile of roadway. Delays totaled over 141 million hours of lost productivity, which equals more than 51,000 truck drivers sitting idle for a working year.
“This concentration of congestion has been well-documented in previous work by ATRI which identified the worst truck bottlenecks in the U.S,” ATRI stated. “Of the 100 worst bottlenecks in ATRI’s 2013 bottleneck analysis, 98 were identified as having “severe” congestion in this cost of congestion analysis.”
Not surprisingly, California led the U.S. with over $1.7 billion in costs, followed by Texas at over $1 billion and New York at $846 million. Illinois and Pennsylvania round out the top five most costly states.
ATRI also determined the average impact of congestion per-truck: 12,000 miles driven saw an average congestion cost of $408, while 100,000 miles cost nearly $4,000 and150,000 miles had an average cost of $5,094.
ATRI is the non-profit research arm of the American Trucking Associations.
The full study results can be ordered here