Traffic Costs Truckers $27 Billion In Extra Fuel, Wages, Study Says

This story appears in the Feb. 11 print edition of Transport Topics.

Trucking fleets wasted some $27 billion on fuel and wages as their vehicles sat in traffic jams around the country during 2011, according to a new report from Texas A&M University’s Transportation Institute.

Overall, traffic congestion in the nation’s urban areas cost American motorists $121 billion, according to the study, $1 billion more than in 2010. Trucking’s total — 22% of the overall cost — matched 2010, according to the study, called the Urban Mobility Report.

Though TTI measured costs based on fuel use and wasted time, researchers also found that congestion is such a grind on reliability that it can badly undermine businesses such as trucking that are designed to thrive on efficiency.

For example, more than 90 minutes must be set aside for a 30-minute trip in order to be on time 95% of the time, the report said. That alone represents a major cost for trucking, said Tim Lomax, one of the researchers who wrote the report.

“If you tell a manufacturer that you need five hours to get from one place to another, they can pretty much plan around that,” Lomax told Transport Topics after the Feb. 5 report release. “But they have a lot harder time, and it’s a lot more costly, if you tell me it’s going to be an hour and it winds up being 2.5 hours.”

The report is based on data gathered from motorists who voluntarily put tracking devices in their vehicles. The highway reliability figure was new to the 2011 study, which has been conducted each year since 1982.

The cost for trucking has been tracked since 2007, when it was $26 billion; at its lowest it was $24 billion in 2008.

At $27 billion, trucking’s cost is as high as it’s ever been, and the overall $121-billion cost is tied with 2007 for the record.

Researchers studied the 498 most populous urban areas in the United States, which include large cities and their suburbs.

“The study points to a need to invest in our highway system to alleviate the congestion,” said Darrin Roth, director of highway operations at American Trucking Associations. “The reluctance by politicians to raise taxes in order to save a few dollars for taxpayers, in the end, costs much more than that.”

Congestion costs the U.S. economy in the additional emissions due to unnecessary fuel use as well, Roth said.

For New England Motor Freight, which is based in Elizabeth, N.J., and makes frequent deliveries into New York City, not being able to predict traffic patterns is the worst effect of congestion, said Tom Connery, the carrier’s chief operating officer.

The area ranked No. 4 on TTI’s list of the most congested urban areas based on the fact that the average driver is delayed 59 hours per year by highway congestion.

“We try not to build in too much time to account for potential delays, but we know that every day there’s going to be a certain amount of delay,” Connery said. “The worst problem is the days when there’s an accident on [Interstate] 80 leading up to the George Washington Bridge, and what is normally a 40-minute delay becomes a 90-minute delay. That happens more often than you may think.”

Washington, D.C., and its suburbs in Maryland and Virginia were the most congested area in TTI’s report. Motorists wasted 67 hours a year in congestion there, the institute said.

“Anyone who has driven on the Capital Beltway is very familiar with how bad congestion is,” said Louis Campion, president of the Maryland Motor Truck Association, which counts Washington in its area of responsibility.

“It really illustrates a problem that a lot of major cities are experiencing, and we’re experiencing here, which is: How are we going to expand our transportation infrastructure to address the commuter concerns and the freight movement concerns?” Campion asked. “And how are we going to pay for it?”

Solving the congestion problem will undoubtedly involve building more highway capacity, he said. But it may require other changes, such as changing shifts for truckers to make deliveries at night and working with shippers to accept those deliveries.

But that’s tough to do if you do business in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas, which are tied for the No. 2 spot in TTI’s rankings.

“The more congestion there is, the slower the driver drives, and the less net revenue we achieve,” said Greg Stefflre, CEO of Rail Delivery Services, a Fontana, Calif., intermodal carrier. “Our timing on the road is subject largely to the scheduling of railroads and steamship lines. So we don’t really get to pick and choose what time we go on the road,” he said.

Scheduling with customers is the main reason carriers often cannot avoid rush-hour congestion, said Kevin Lhotak, president of Reliable Transportation Specialists Inc., Chesterton, Ind.

“You can’t tell a customer what time they want their load delivered, so we can’t avoid the congestion sometimes,” Lhotak said. Reliable Transportation operates in the Chicago area, which is ranked No. 7 on the TTI list.