Transportation
Once home to the worst traffic congestion in the country, Boston now trails New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
In a rare bit of good news for Boston drivers, a new report claims the city’s traffic improved slightly in 2024.
The bad news: Boston traffic still ranks fourth worst in the U.S. and 12th in the world, according to the latest Global Traffic Scorecard from transportation analytics company INRIX.
The annual study found that Boston’s congestion cost about $1,414 per driver last year, with motorists losing an average of 79 hours (about 3.3 days) to traffic jams. That’s compared to around 88 hours of delays for the average Boston driver in 2023, when the city’s traffic was fourth-worst in the nation and eighth-worst in the world.
Once home to the worst traffic congestion in the country, Boston now trails New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, which took home the top three spots. However, Interstate 93 southbound got a nod as the second-busiest traffic corridor in the U.S., with a traffic hotspot stretching from the Charles River to Pilgrim’s Highway.
“A driver taking that road at 3:00 PM every weekday would spend about 109 extra hours on the road due to traffic jams,” the INRIX report noted.
Boston’s 2024 traffic stats were something of a mixed bag: While 8,000 more people biked to work in Boston last year than in 2022, drivers routinely traveled at 13 mph through downtown Boston, according to the report.
Nationwide, traffic jams cost drivers an average of 43 hours in 2024, or about one full work week, INRIX explained in a Monday press release. That amounts to more than $74 billion in lost time nationally.
“While the U.S. is still behind pre-2020 levels of traffic, a pullback of remote and hybrid work models, specifically in tech-heavy areas like San Jose, San Francisco, and Seattle, brought a large jump in downtown trips, which is a good sign for metropolitan economies,” explained Bob Pishue, an INRIX transportation analyst and the report’s author.
Still, he added: “Traffic can be an indicator of economic boon, but ironically, it’s a hamper on economies in of itself. Each minute spent waiting in traffic results in money and productivity lost.”
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