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CNN Live Today

Drivers Spending More and More Time Stuck in Traffic

Aired June 20, 2002 - 11:10   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Moving on to other news this morning -- news of more mundane nature, why do they call it rush hour, when nobody's going anywhere fast? Well number crunchers confirm today what you already know: that you're spending more and more time behind the wheel stuck in traffic.

CNN Environment correspondent Natalie Pawelski, is here. She's got our life in the fast lane report this morning. What's the word?

NATALIE PAWELSKI, CNN ENVIRONMENTAL CORRESPONDENT: I guess it's actually life in the slow lane these days in Atlanta.

HARRIS: You got it.

PAWELSKI: The annual study, Urban Mobility Report from the Texas Transportation Institute came out today and the news is, yes, things are, in fact, getting worse. Let's take a look at the top ten or bottom ten, depending how you look at it, list of cities in terms of traffic.

The worst of the worst again this year by almost every measure is Los Angeles. Just to give you one example, the rush hour trip will take about 90 percent longer during rush hour than it would in the rest of the day. Take a look at the rest of the San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C. And then we've got Seattle, Miami, Boston, San Jose, Denver and New York.

All of these cities are just in serious trouble when it comes to traffic. And I would like to show you one more trend. Rush hour isn't just getting worse, it's getting longer. Back in 1982, for example, rush hour only lasted about 4 1/2 hours in your average city. For all cities that's the number on the end there. 1982, about four hours a day of congested roads. Today, seven hours a day of congested roads.

So we're not talking rush hour, Leon. We are talking rush hours, and it's getting worse.

HARRIS: Oh, my goodness. Well what's being done about this? Is there any good news at all anywhere in this story?

PAWELSKI: This particular study is done by traffic engineers, which means they just give us all the bad news and not a lot of solutions. They say that it's probably kind of boutique solutions. In other words, in some cities, transit might work. In other cities, telecommuting might help. In other cities, a few more roads are needed.

But the thing is, there are just so many more cars on the road, so many more people traveling, so many more miles these days. None of those factors can really keep up with it. They don't think we will ever end traffic jams as we know it. They say the best we can probably hope for is to slow the rate of increase of congestion.

HARRIS: OK. Well let me ask you this, because you are the environment correspondent.

PAWELSKI: Yes.

HARRIS: That list of cities with the worst traffic, where do they fall in cities -- in the list of cities with bad pollution or the worst air?

PAWELSKI: Well, L.A. is often way at top. Different cities have different air pollution sources, and in some places it's more manufacturing or energy generation combustion (ph). But for ground- level ozone, which is, by in large -- especially in cities like Atlanta -- created by cars, you know it's the exhaust from cars getting baked in the sun and turning into ground-level ozone or smog. You know, here in Atlanta, the traffic is a huge problem.

HARRIS: Yeah. And as a matter of fact, that's why many of us in this room are wondering why Atlanta is not higher up on that list.

PAWELSKI: Exactly. It all depends on how you slice the numbers, though. And this is one particular set of numbers. They looked at 75 cities with particular data sets and analyzed it in different ways. So a city might be top of one list and halfway down in another.

HARRIS: Like they say about statistics.

PAWELSKI: Lies -- darn lies in statistics.

HARRIS: Yeah, there you go.

PAWELSKI: Yes, there you go.

HARRIS: Natalie Pawelski, thank you very much. Appreciate that.

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