In the U.S. alone, congestion cost $305 billion last year, an increase of $10 billion from 2016. That’s the big, bad takeaway from the largest-ever study of global vehicular traffic by the transportation consulting firm INRIX. Armed with five terabytes of data on 1,360 cities in 38 countries, the study provides a strong empirical sense of how much traffic congestion costs individual cities and drivers.
Not surprisingly, traffic takes the biggest economic toll on the largest, most economically vibrant cities.
