Estimating Urban Freight Congestion Costs: Methodologies, Measures, and Applications

Congestion is a significant problem in America’s 439 urban areas. According to the Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s 2011 Urban Mobility Report (UMR), congestion caused urban Americans to travel 4.8 billion hours more and to purchase an extra 1.9 billion gallons of fuel for a congestion cost of $101 billion. The UMR informs decision-making at the federal, state, and local levels. In 2011, the Texas A&M Transportation Institute released the inaugural Congested Corridors Report, which produces congestion statistics for the 328 most congested directional corridors in the United States. With the documented growth in freight shipments, particularly in the trucking sector, researchers were interested in developing methodologies and measures to help inform policy-makers and decision-makers characterize the impacts of congestion on urban areas. These methodologies and measures were developed and incorporated into the UMR and CCR. The methodologies use inventory data from the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA’s) Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS) and historical speed data from INRIX® to estimate wasted time (delay in person-hours) and diesel fuel (gallons wasted), as well as the associated costs for trucks in urban congestion. The results and rankings appear intuitive, and this information provides an important dimension to these reports for characterizing congestion levels in urban areas and along congested corridors in America. This information will help to inform trucking stakeholders by quantifying the congestion impact to the trucking community. Researchers will continue to include truck delay, wasted fuel, and associated costs for urban area trucks in future releases of the UMR and CCR.