Just a Little Congestion
January 30, 2025
Delay of the Land
The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) study, “Cost of Congestion to the Trucking Industry,” highlights the price we all literally pay for congestion throughout the nation.
In 2022, the most recent year of full statistics on this, the financial impact of delay totaled more than $108 billion.
The average per-hour operational cost jumped from $63.66 per hour in 2016 to $90.78 in 2022.
Delay of the Land
ATRI’s description of this:
“The marginal costs to operate a truck include line-items such as fuel, truck and trailer purchases/leases, repair and maintenance, tires, insurance premiums, tolls, permits and licenses, and truck driver wages and benefits. These costs reflect a wide range of economic factors such as freight demand, global oil production, litigation and labor markets.”
Reasons for that surge? In 2022, as we felt the effects and repercussions of COVID-19:
- the transportation industry was reeling from a sharp rise in diesel fuel;
- prices for new, used, and leased trucks, tractors, and components rose as a result of supply chain backlogs for parts;
- fewer available vehicles meant that those in service were driven longer, and that meant higher costs to repair and maintain; and
- compensation for drivers rose apace with the driver shortage and the resulting competition to attract new drivers.
And then, adding insult to injury, as we returned to the roads as COVID restrictions eased the congestion returned. The infrastructure bill paved the way for much-needed work on our nation’s roads, bridges, and tunnels. And yet, the report speculates that maybe the priorities haven’t been thought through fully.
ATRI’s study says that “it is not clear whether all this infrastructure investment was adequately targeted to traffic congestion hotspots and bottlenecks, which is where strategic investments are most needed.”
It’s all about hotspots and bottlenecks. Which sounds like names of nightclubs on Padre Island. That’s where we’re going next time. Not to Padre Island. To the traffic things.
