Meet ATRI's Top Congested Freight Highways
The nation’s worst traffic bottleneck is located in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where Interstate 95 and State Road 4 merge just west of Manhattan’s George Washington Bridge, according to the American Transportation Research Institute’s 2014 survey of congested U.S. freight highways.
ATRI’s congestion impact analysis of freight significant highway locations, released Dec. 17, said the New Jersey bottleneck bumped to second the perennial first-place holder, Chicago’s Circle Interchange at I-290 and I-90/I-94, largely due to overnight construction at the top deck of the Washington Bridge.
Atlanta’s I-285 at I-85 North interchange was the third-worst bottleneck, Cincinnati’s I-71 at I-75 interchange No. 4, and Houston’s I-45 at U.S. 59 was rated No. 5.
Numbers 6-10 are Houston’s I-610 at U.S. 290 interchange; St. Louis’ I-70 at I-64 West interchange; Los Angeles’ merger of state roads 60 and 57; Louisville, Kentucky’s I-65 at I-64/I-71; and I-35 in Austin, Texas.
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The ATRI analysis, an annual effort since 2002, utilized several customized software applications and analysis methods, along with terabytes of data from trucking operations along with Federal Highway Administration data to produce a congestion-impact ranking for each of 250 locations throughout the United States.
The report ranked the top 100 of those 250 locations monitored.
ATRI said the 250 monitored locations were developed from multiple years of data analysis, past research identifying freight-flow congestion in these areas, surveys of private and public sector stakeholders, and through the use of available highway speed and volume-related datasets.
“ATRI’s identification of congestion impacts at freight-significant locations is a critical tool in the transportation planning toolbox,” said Matt Hart, president of the Illinois Trucking Association and a member of ATRI’s Research Advisory Committee.
Hart added, “Better-informed decisions mean more targeted infrastructure investment at critical freight nodes. Here in Illinois, we’re seeing firsthand how ATRI’s identification of the Circle Interchange as the No. 1 freight bottleneck in previous studies led to a significant state investment to fix the choke point.”
