Thinking Outside the Interchange

Alternative Ways to Unclog America’s Worst Truck Bottlenecks

ATRI’s 2026 Top 100 Truck Bottlenecks report is, as always, a useful document for anyone who moves freight for a living and a depressing one for everyone else.

Chicago reclaimed the top spot. Houston placed eight interchanges in the top 100. Atlanta showed up so many times, it’s starting to feel personal.

The conventional prescription is familiar: widen lanes, rebuild interchanges, add capacity. That’s expensive, slow, and politically complicated. So what else might actually work?

The most practical alternative is probably the least glamorous: aggressive off-peak incentives for freight. Several of the worst bottlenecks are peak-hour problems, not all-day problems. If shippers and receivers received meaningful cost reductions for accepting deliveries between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., a measurable share of truck traffic would simply migrate out of rush hour. No new concrete required. The barrier is coordination, not engineering.

A close second is dynamic routing powered by real-time GPS data of exactly the kind ATRI has been collecting for 25 years. The data already exists. The question is whether carriers, fleet management platforms, and state DOTs can get talking to each other fast enough to matter. Platooning technology, where trucks run in close convoy to reduce drag and increase lane efficiency, could amplify this if the regulatory framework ever catches up to the hardware.

Now, to let our imagination off the leash a little:

Someone will eventually propose dedicated freight tunnels under the worst urban corridors, particularly in Houston, where you could practically route a separate underground highway system beneath the existing one and still have room for a food court. The boring (pun intended) part is the $40 billion price tag.

And then there is the full science fiction option: autonomous electric freight drones handling last-mile and short-haul loads currently moved by truck. Eliminate enough of the smaller delivery trucks from those interchanges, and the math changes. The skies above I-45 at I-69 doing 20.2 mph at rush hour suddenly seem more appealing than the pavement below.

None of these solutions are fast. But neither, apparently, is Houston at 5 p.m.