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CNN Live Today

Life in the Fast Lane

Aired June 20, 2002 - 12:45   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.
FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Turning now to a problem that you may have faced as early as this morning: bumper-to-bumper traffic. A new report finds that Americans are spending more time stuck in rush-hour traffic than ever before.

Our Natalie Pawelski joins us live with some of the worst traffic spots out there -- Natalie.

NATALIE PAWELSKI, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Fredricka, the Texas Transportation Institute looked at 75 cities across the country and calculated how many hours the average rush-hour driver is wasting in traffic every year. Get this. We are wasting an average of 62 hours a year. That's not total travel time. That's just extra time spent behind the wheel because traffic is going slow or going nowhere.

Now, the institute looks at statistics in a variety of different ways. And L.A. pretty much comes out as top dog, or bottom of the barrel, depending on how you look at it, in just about every category.

In this one, for example, the average rush-hour driver in L.A. wastes 136 hours a year, extra time because of traffic jams, more than three weeks' worth. The rest of the runners up in that time-drain category: San Francisco, D.C., Seattle, Houston, San Jose, Dallas, New York, Atlanta and Miami.

But, you know, it's not just the big cities where this is a problem. I would like to take a look at some national trends over the last 20 years. In every category on this graph, what it shows is how many more hours a year we are wasting in traffic, from the green line on the bottom, which is small cities, all the way up to the red line on the top, which is the very big cities.

All told, we are wasting an average of 46 more hours in traffic a year, they tell me. And, for those very large cities, that number is an extra 60 hours a year. Big cities like Los Angeles, Fredricka, it seems like everybody is going nowhere fast.

WHITFIELD: Well, Natalie, what about public transportation and HOV lanes? I thought all of those things were supposed to help.

PAWELSKI: And this study believes that those could help, but maybe there is no one silver bullet that can take care of all of problems. And, you know, a lot of the public transiting, people pushing public transportation argue that some of these numbers may not be quite on target. There are a lot of different solutions for a lot of different cities. In some cases, transit could be a help. In other cases, maybe some new roads are needed. What about telecommuting? The study suggests that the problem has gotten so bad so fast that none of these small approaches is completely adequate for the problem.

WHITFIELD: Oh, boy. And with more development, it seems like we are only going to be in bigger problem, in the metropolitan areas, at least.

All right, Natalie Pawelski, thank you very much.

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